Will your experience now change when listening to pundits on TV, who respond to most questions by starting off with the word: "So"?

I have noticed that there appears to be a new and most dreadful "virus-like" illness (going "viral"), one which tends to affect educated, sensible, highly qualified people (well, I can assure you that it most certainly doesn't affect me - - - - er ... Ooops !!). Pundits, asked a question by presenters on TV or radio, seem apparently compelled to start off most of their answers with the word "So". 

Well, you may ask, "So, what?"

So, its [self-censored ... ] annoying, that's why!
So, those afflicted in that manner ought to get treatment.
So, does anyone else have this problem - either those who are: afflicted with it, or afflicted by it? 

So, here's a relevant extract by way of illustration:
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[Heading:] "It’s so annoying
So why do people feel compelled to start every sentence with ‘so’?"
by Mark Mason, The Spectator, 5 November 2011.

"[...] We live in the Age of So. Dot Wordsworth commented on it in these pages recently, though was lost for an explanation. The phenomenon was illustrated on Radio 5 Live’s Drive programme a while back, when Peter Allen interviewed Steve Robertson of BT OpenReach about the expansion of superfast broadband.

Allen: ‘What will actually happen?’
Robertson: ‘So, what will happen is that we’re either going to be taking fibre to their home or to their business...’
Allen: ‘And how expensive is all this?’
Robertson: ‘So, we’ve already committed two and a half billion pounds...’

Within minutes listeners were emailing to express irritation at this growing habit of starting every answer with the word ‘so’. Offenders tend to be PR spokesmen — though even politicians are doing it. Witness Grant Shapps on the Today programme, asked about housing benefit changes: ‘So, I think there are three things...’ What’s going on here?

Part of the answer might be the need to belong. ‘It’s called “accommodation”,’ says Dr Penelope Gardner-Chloros, of the department of applied linguistics and communication at Birkbeck College. ‘We accommodate, and converge with, the group of people we want to belong to. Someone using “so” like this may well be doing it because they’ve heard other people doing it. It spreads like the flu.’ [...]"

Extract source:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/it-s-so-annoying

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