Fifteen years ago, when I endured a brief stint as a news reporter, things were simpler. I’d go into the office, meet with the managing editor, figure out what I was going to cover that day, go to the police station and shoot the bull with the cops and write down what they said about what was going on, crime-wise, in the city that day. If something caught on fire or somebody shot their spouse in the head, I’d drive out to the scene in my Hyundai and take notes until the cops got things under control. The next morning, the 30,000 citizens of our fair town would find out what happened after the newspaper with my story in it was dropped on their doorstep.
Now things are different. The “news cycle” (the gap between the time a newsworthy event happens and when your news medium of choice can deliver information about it to readers or viewers) has become infinitesimal thanks to the internet.
This has caused something maddening to take place. In an attempt to magically extend the news cycle, the news now tries to predict the future. It’s understandable that they would try to do this, since today anything that ever happens is old news the instant it happens. But unless news-gathering organizations have a fleet of time machines that they’re not telling us about, the practice is completely bogus. It is worse than making stuff up, because today, predictions are frequently offered up as fact.
Elections are one area where this happens a lot. In the last few presidential election cycles, TV news obsessed about polling, often running several different and conflicting opinion polls at once. They aren’t using polls as much to fill the news hole this time around, and I suspect that’s intentional — they looked like buffoons trying to call the 2000 election, but more importantly, the results of public opinion polls aren’t particularly newsworthy.
Of course, in this election cycle it was clear early on that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee (because she had all this experience as a former White House tenant) and the Republican nominee would be anybody-but-McCain (since McCain had no money and he didn’t appeal to the bible-thumpers).
Oops. So much for news reporters’ ability to predict the future.
The economy is another area where prognostication dominates, especially these days. It’s pretty clear we’re in a recession right now although no politician will admit it. So the question is really what kind of recession this will be — will it be bad (like the recession of the 1970s), or will it be comparatively mild (like the 2001 recession)? The answer to this question is a big deal, particularly for business owners like me. Do you hold back on hiring and purchases because you want to hold on to your money to weather the recession? (Understanding, of course, that businesses holding back on hiring and purchases can cause a recession.)
The word that’s been batted around recently is “stagflation“, a pernicious combination of price inflation and unemployment. Stagflation characterized the 1970s recession, and it had a lot to do with the fact that the government printed money to finance the Vietnam War. But each time I hear the term applied to what’s supposed to happen in the recession of 2008, it sounds made-up. “Stagflation” might be a proxy term for “really bad recession,” I’m not sure. But when it appears in the news, it’s nearly always unsourced — meaning some writer is making it up. (This morning on NPR I heard that U.S. inflation was actually flat last month, so maybe they’re going to have to find a new proxy term. Memo to NPR: “deep recession” sounds less comical than “stagflation,” which to me always invoked the image of a bloated bovine.)
News writers try to predict the future in other kinds of business reporting all the time, especially in technology. Coverage of Apple is foremost here. For every true story about the next Mac or iPhone release, there have to be at least a hundred “rumors”, stories or predictions about what Apple will do next. The Nintendo Wii gets some of this, too, but not as much. In today’s Times there’s this story where the writer breathlessly proclaims that Super Smash Bros. Brawl “will almost surely be one of the top-selling games of 2008 and may become the best-selling game yet for Nintendo’s popular Wii console”. Says who? And why is that relevant to your review, anyway? Just tell me if the game is any good.
Consumers of news should pay closer attention to when writers make stuff up and call them on it. The incredible shrinking news cycle is no excuse. Listening to one bonehead or another try to predict the future is what people in primitive cultures do when they can’t figure out what makes it rain. We shouldn’t stand for it in our news.
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Great post, Mr. P! But… what am I supposed to do with these goat entrails now?