For this election season, I would like to be a television pundit, commentator, consultant or whatever title seems appropriate (and pays well). I have the credentials: I do not have a steady day job. I have not covered or been involved in politics in a generation. I am white, generally liberal, and Jewish. I can be balanced with an African-American, non-Jewish woman who is also looking for work.

Seriously, what is it that makes TV networks, after spending huge amounts on decent reporting and technology, feel they need has-been pundits to tell us what to think? Is it for entertainment? A laugh? Think Pat Buchanan, who was too far right for Ronald Reagan, who consigned him to the White House basement (I know; I covered both of them then), and who probably did more than anyone to keep George H.W. Bush from a second term. Remember Pat’s entertainment at the 1992 convention? What a laugh!

When “Meet the Press” was “Meet the Press,” it seemed boring because all it did was grill public officials about the issues. Now it’s “Meet Tim Russert,” who rarely mentions that he he once worked for the late Democratic Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and then New York’s Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo before he went to work for NBC.

Don’t get me wrong, Russert is a good newsman and a tough questioner, especially when interviewing Democrats. Russert also depends a great deal on pundits. Such as Democratic adviser Robert Shrum, who still doesn’t know why he lost John Kerry’s race in 2004. Russert balances Shrum with Mike Murphy, whose losing candidate was Sen. John McCain in 2000.

Is there credibility in the words and opinions of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, another NBC pundit, who lost his job because of charges of plagiarism?

As Alessandra Stanley pointed out in a fine New York Times piece February 4, which gave me the idea for this piece, the networks may care about balance “but they are careless about bias; the experts are supposed to be impartial but it is left to viewers to parse their complicated pedigrees and entwined political obligations.” What they say, she suggested, “ should be accompanied by an asterisk.”

To my old fashioned journalism way of thinking, a line was crossed when clearly opinionated and ideological political apparatchiki were hired as mainstream press writers and reporters. And the line is obliterated altogether when these people are hired as commentators, when their own records as pundits are suspect. Does anyone confront George Will on the number of times he’s been wrong? Or William Kristol? Or Tom Friedman?

An old friend, a longtime Washington bureau chief once told me: “Only in Washington do some people get a platinum failure card. They fail, they use their cards and they become stars or pundits.”