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Wednesday Email: Talking head
If you are a news junky like me, you probably know the talking heads in your country by sight, if not by name.
Even though the days of sitting in front of the TV to watch a scheduled news program are numbered, we still see the talking heads on YouTube or wherever we get our news.
A talking head is an expert who appears on TV. We often see them in close up and not walking around or doing very much except talking.
Talking heads are often university professors, ex-diplomats or retired military officers who can use their expertise and knowledge to provide us, the viewers, with some insight into the news of the day.
The amazing thing I find is that every country has at least one expert for everything that could become a topic.
Did you know that your country had so many specialists in Ukrainian history or the Russian economy?
Where do news agencies find these people?
With the declaration of the pandemic a little more than two years ago, the talking heads who were knowledgeable in mRNA vaccines and epidemiology popped up from everywhere.
It’s great that we can access authoritative commentary from professionals, but where do they come from?
I imagine there were a bunch of people studying the Russian economy for decades before the West unleashed its economic war on the country.
After all those decades of study, they finally get their fifteen minutes of fame, appearing on TV as talking heads.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 9th-grade education (age 15).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 58.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.