The Media's Nostradamus Complex

Lionel Shriver is a novelist who is controversial in the literary world for her withering criticism of "cultural appropriation." It's the notion that if you belong to one ethnic, racial, or gender group, you're barred from writing fiction with characters from another group. If you're Asian, for instance, you must stick to Asian characters. Shriver calls this idea, which extends to cuisine, music, and fashion, a "cockamamie concept."

She's fearless. We know this because she's now attacked one of the biggest shortcomings of journalists, who are sensitive to criticism. Shriver's practice is to "avoid squandering time on what 'might happen.' Half the average newspaper falls into this category," she writes in the Spectator, the British magazine. "It's hard enough to keep up what is happening."

Public speakers, she goes on, "promote courses of action that they're in no position to institute: all talk. The government 'might' adopt some policy about which we'll never hear again. Were all those 'promising' medical studies to have proved out … we'd now have eliminated cancer, Alzheimer's, malaria, eczema, heart disease, criminality, schizophrenia, ageing, obesity, HIV, and hair loss, not to mention mortality."

It wasn't just the British press Shriver, who's from North Carolina, was upbraiding. The future is an obsession of American papers, magazines, and TV news shows. Journalists are addicted to what "might" happen. They love dubious studies about the future seriously.

Take the coverage of the Congressional Budget Office's assessment of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Everyone knows how wildly unreliable CBO's findings are. Yet the CBO estimate that the GOP plan would lead to millions fewer people with health insurance received big-time coverage. The Washington Post led its front page with the story.