Academic Snobbery?

A few weeks back I wrote about what I though was academic snobbery - I get a little agitated when I hear TV and radio interview "economists", who are commercial economists, employed by some company, rather than academic economists.

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative Mike Moffatt has written on something very similar: The fact that non-economists perceive economists as being something they are not because of these guys that appear in the media and give black and white answers to questions which any serious economist knows have many shades of gray/grey.  Mike says that academic economists thus are not invited for these kinds of interviews because we don't give an exciting opinionated sound-bite.