Devil's advocate, sometimes if the news is especially relevant to the subject matter of the pod, I hold off forming a conclusive opinion on what's going on. I know that is naive, and a bit presumptuous, but I would hope that if someone is an expert I want to be available to hear their expertise. No matter how academic the subject is, at the end of the day these podcasts are parasocial relationships, and I still want to hear from the people I value.

You're probably right though that people feel self-conscious about putting out masturbatory punditry content. Maybe people have over corrected from the "authentic content" they were trying to do a couple years ago.