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.

Am I an Academic Snob?

When listening to Radio 4 on the BBC driving into work, and when reading newspaper articles, I'm increasing noticing that when news sources interview economics, it is rarely the academic type they interview, usually the commercially employed ones, and I wonder why that is, and whether it's always been that way.  An example is in this article about the Bank of England where Simon Ward is called upon.

I often do get emails at work (university) about opportunities to talk to the press, but they aren't that frequent.  Maybe it's because my university is a provincial, non-London one?  Maybe London-based academic economists do get a lot more opportunities?

Or is it that commercially based economists are a different breed to us academics?  More happy to state their opinion, and happy to take strong positions?  Academic economists generally are more reserved types (I say generally, of course there are plenty of excepions like Andy Rose, Steve Levitt, Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong to name but a few) who will hedge their responses: The classic one-handed economist (on the one hand... but on the other hand...) is hard to find.

I don't know if I feel offended by this, but one thing I know is that the strong opinions expressed on the economy by more commercially based economists have a greater chance of being plain wrong than the more couched and qualified responses of your academic economist.  Of course, for the Torygraph, an academic economist is also probably far too left-wing to be considered...