The next time you watch network news or read online news, pay attention to the ratio between the reporting of what happened and the speculation about what might happen. Are you pleased with the ratio? If so, what satisfaction do you get from the “would” and “could” and “might” and “maybe”? Is it the same satisfaction derived from reading utopian and dystopian fiction? If so, why not leave speculations to the novelists (or fortune tellers) and the reporting of facts to the journalists? It is essential, I believe, to keep these tasks separate.
Because the muddling of epistemological categories like truth, fiction, lie, conspiracy and conjecture changes how we behave politically, it is incumbent on us to revisit these categories with care and to ensure that serious journalists make a concerted effort to maintain strong distinctions among them.
What Is the Future of Speculative Journalism?
by Christy Wampole
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/opinion/speculative-journalism-future.html
We’ve really gotten ahead of ourselves. Our eagerness to know what will happen next, particularly in relation to the Trump saga, manifests itself in a hunger for conjecture in places that we once relied on to deliver fact — in particular, journalism. Reporters and editors making guesses at what might happen rather than reporting what did happen results in what is typically called speculative journalism.
While this tendency to speculate has existed in journalism since its inception, its prevalence in recent months strikes me as peculiar at a time when all sides seem to be calling for more truth and less fake news. Because speculation is neither true nor false, it seems to work as a strange compromise, a third way that shelves for now the question of what is real and true.
Network news relies on these speculations most frequently, but newspapers certainly indulge in the practice. A few examples of speculative headlines from recent days: “Republicans’ 2018 Resolution: Bipartisanship. Will It Last?” (The New York Times); “A Trump-Mueller Sitdown: Could the Endless Russia Probe Soon Be Over?” (Fox News); “How Breitbart Might Change, or Not, Without Steve Bannon” (The Washington Post); “Russia Collusion Inquiry Faces a Big 2018 — but Will Trump Let Mueller Finish the Job?” (The Guardian); “Who Is Going to Run for President in 2020?” (The Wall Street Journal). All of these articles appear in the news sections of their publication, not in the opinion pages, where speculation might be more fitting.
All this speculation raises a number of new questions in my mind: If this is just clickbait, to what impulse are we responding? Do we simply enjoy the exercise that speculation offers our imaginations? Is the current state of things so unstable, or unbearable, that we now prefer potentiality to actuality? Does speculation provide the same anticipatory thrills as a wrapped gift or the ascent of that first hill on a roller coaster? Is the best journalist now the most clairvoyant one, the one who tells us not how it was but how it will be? These are all speculative questions (as is, you may have noticed, the headline of this piece), but their location here, in an opinion piece, marks them as the open-ended guesswork of a person whose job isn’t to report what happened.
One explanation for all this is that the acceleration of information flow has heightened our impatience with not knowing. Until the internet’s arrival, the “jour,” or day, was the primary unit of time by which journalism functioned. But now that the minute, or better, the second, is the new unit of preference, it might be more fitting to change the profession’s name to minutalism or secondalism. In the attempt to capture an event just as it happens, or even before it does, the news becomes less factual and more hypothetical. The absurdity of the word “tomorrowism” might just match the absurdity of the phenomenon.
Another theory is offered by Richard Grusin in his excellent book “Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11,” in which he describes the ways in which the media in all its iterations tries to buffer itself against a repetition of the shock that was Sept 11. In response to an event that caught everyone off guard and left the nation steeped in residual trauma, premediation allows for the sustainment of a constant, baseline fear by keeping catastrophe always within peripheral view. This is accomplished in part by creating a media apparatus into which any future event might be plugged, offering us the illusion of preparedness. Hurricanes, nuclear wars, stock market plunges, epidemics, terror attacks, earthquakes and currency collapses: The headlines prepare us for all of these by rehearsing them in advance.
Mr. Grusin writes: “Premediation is not about getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the networked world experienced on 9/11.” Mediatic readiness — and anticipation — has become necessity.
I believe something similar is going on in response to Trump trauma. Despite efforts to remain poised for all of the world’s contingencies through the process of premediation Mr. Grusin describes, many of us were startled by Mr. Trump’s victory. The media, which seems to be repenting for having misread or misrepresented polls that showed a sure Hillary Clinton win, now atones by constantly hedging — offering us a tree of all possible outcomes and a range of fairly noncommittal speculations that can be backed away from if their conjectures prove false.
This leads us to a third possible reason speculative journalism thrives today: its mitigation of risk. What the speculative journalist has in common with the gamblers of Las Vegas and Wall Street is the willingness to take risks, but the stakes in this game are relatively low. When the future materializes, there will certainly be winners and losers. Someone will have gotten it right, and this certainty reassures us somehow. But given the superabundance of speculations clouding the mediascape, will anyone remember or care exactly who got it wrong? Those who were right will trumpet their prophetic insight and ascend as soothsayers; those who were wrong will simply keep quiet. One has little to lose but much to gain from this wager.
In the past, a journalist lost integrity when his or her reporting turned out to be incorrect, their sources corrupt, their methods dubious. But in the realm of the hypothetical, these standards vanish. The code of ethics for the journalist who guesses rather than reports has yet to be written. It is less risky, then, to write speculatively than to risk violating, say, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. I find nothing in the code about speculation. Perhaps an amendment is in order?
Finally, of course, there is the role of the president in all this. His utter unpredictability has certainly contributed to the general willingness to speculate about what will happen next under this administration. In fact, there is something eerily Trump-specific about the whole phenomenon. In the chess game between journalists and Mr. Trump, he keeps making off-the-board moves, leaving them at a loss on how to report on him. Speculative journalism offers a solution in that it opens up a little space between what he did and what he’ll do, a space in which journalists might average all of his past actions in order to predict his next one. It gives one a sense of control, albeit tenuous, over the situation. It is the only way not to be caught completely unaware.
As in any endeavor, the very best speculative journalism has some beneficial value. There is positive potential in those pieces that aim at exhaustiveness, diagraming all possible outcomes and playing out some of the scenarios as examples, like a Choose Your Own Adventure story whose scaffolding has been revealed. The “if … then” logic of such articles does not force the reader to invest too much hope or dread into one particular outcome. They work more like a map than a horoscope, and for this reason serve a navigational purpose for the public. Unfortunately, most speculative pieces do not follow this model and instead poke at those parts of our brains made for wishing or fearing.
The next time you watch network news or read online news, pay attention to the ratio between the reporting of what happened and the speculation about what might happen. Are you pleased with the ratio? If so, what satisfaction do you get from the “would” and “could” and “might” and “maybe”? Is it the same satisfaction derived from reading utopian and dystopian fiction? If so, why not leave speculations to the novelists (or fortune tellers) and the reporting of facts to the journalists? It is essential, I believe, to keep these tasks separate.
Because the muddling of epistemological categories like truth, fiction, lie, conspiracy and conjecture changes how we behave politically, it is incumbent on us to revisit these categories with care and to ensure that serious journalists make a concerted effort to maintain strong distinctions among them.
It is easy for me to imagine that most fake news stories or conspiracy theories began as one person’s random conjecture that then circulated online or by word of mouth and gained legitimacy by virtue of its repetition and circulation. Could journalists unwittingly be engaged in a similar operation? I could venture a hypothesis, but that would be pure speculation.