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| A GUESSING GAME? | |
 June 23, 1999 
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Media correspondent Terence Smith talks with three pundits about the dangers of predictive journalism. The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
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SPOKESPERSON: ("This Week") This Sunday morning -- TERENCE SMITH: -- to the all-news networks -- SPOKESPERSON: Crossfire -- TERENCE SMITH: -- the wartime prediction game was all the rage. JOHN McLAUGHLIN: Prediction! Fasten your seat belts. Madeleine Albright will not survive the Kosovo blunder -- TERENCE SMITH: The 78 days of fighting in the Balkans produced an endless stream of forecasts from the chattering class. LAURA SILBER: Prediction: Ground troops in Kosovo.
FRED BARNES: Graduated escalation didn't work in Vietnam and it is not working here either. TERENCE SMITH: The Vietnam analogy came up often on the air waves and
op-ed pages, as did SAM DONALDSON: Air power could not stop the killing on the ground, and indeed it hasn't. GEORGE WILL: We're going to find that NATO, like Hitler before it, like Napoleon before it, forgot about the winter. TERENCE SMITH: But before NATO settled in for that long winter: TERENCE SMITH: The air war's success and the arrival in Kosovo of NATO peacekeepers has had many members of the predictive media dining on their own words -- and others serving them up. PAUL BEGALA: (to Ollie North) You're going to have to eat a lot of crow, my friend. TERENCE SMITH: Syndicated columnist Tony Snow, host of "Fox News
Sunday," was one critic who TONY SNOW: Now here's something you won't hear every day from a journalist. I was wrong; I was wrong about air power, you were right, Mr. President. My bad.
MARA LIASSON: I think there's not going to be much of a primary to
speak of. I think both of these guys TERENCE SMITH: But Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal recently cautioned his colleagues on CNN against predicting the election's outcome at this early stage:
TERENCE SMITH: Nonetheless, with 16 months and hours of airtime to go before election day, the safest forecast is for more predictive journalism, not less. |
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| The pundits speak. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Jeff Greenfield, let me begin with you. There seems to be something of a trend here towards predictions among more and more reporters. I wonder what you think is behind it. JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN: Well, as Bob Dole once said of a vice presidency, "It's indoor work, and there's no heavy lifting." It's the least intellectually taxing question that somebody can ask or the least intellectually taxing answer somebody can give, and one of the least challenging discussions for an audience. You're not actually talking about history, culture, facts. You're talking about what one of my law school professors used to call breezy speculation, or the initials thereof. And in an era where there's more and more talk on cable, the cheapest thing you can do on television is to bring people into the studio and have them talk, and the easiest kind of talk is to say what's going to happen. TERENCE SMITH: Eleanor Clift, you're a serial predictor, yourself. A prediction is demanded of you each week on the "McLaughlin Group." Are you comfortable with it? |
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| Drive-by journalism? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Tony Snow, we saw you apologizing for being wrong; we're all wrong, of course, from time to time. What prompted you to do that?
TERENCE SMITH: Does this mean you're ready to join Predictors Anonymous? TONY SNOW: No. No. I actually don't make that many predictions because I'm always wrong anyway, so I suppose you can say I'm going to join Predictors Anonymous, but you know that won't happen. Every once in a while the bug bites, and you do it despite your best instincts. TERENCE SMITH: Jeff Greenfield. Go ahead. You started to say something.
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| Increasing the public's mistrust of the media? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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TERENCE SMITH: Right. Eleanor, the criticism that one hears of this - of this tendency - and you do see more and more of it, particularly on television - is that it increases the public's mistrust of journalists, particularly when they're wrong. Do you think so?
TERENCE SMITH: And that's just the mindset. ELEANOR CLIFT: That's the mindset, exactly. TERENCE SMITH: Right. ELEANOR CLIFT: So it encourages a lot of people operating on the edge of the envelope with negative comments.
TONY SNOW: Terry, actually I think there is and it's one you pointed out. You lose a little bit of your credibility as an analyst to the news, because people say, you know what, if they were so wrong on predicting the outcome of the war, they were so wrong on predicting what might happen to Bill Clinton, why should I trust their judgment in evaluating all the various facts in the day's news? And so you find people increasingly turning away from the so-called mainstream press -- trying to get news and analysis from the Internet, from newsletters, from any number of sources. So I think there is a very real cost; now, it's one that we do not enforce upon ourselves. And that was the point Jeff was trying to make it. Instead, consumers extract it by saying, well, you know, I'll look somewhere else; these guys are dopes; I'll try to find somebody who at least seems to know what they're talking about. JEFF GREENFIELD: Terry. TERENCE SMITH: Yes, Jeff. JEFF GREENFIELD: First of all, there's a temptation - and I think - I'll acknowledge this - somebody points a camera at you and asks you to predict, you think, well, they wouldn't bring me into a studio and throw these lights at me if I didn't know. I mean, you can get deluded about this. And the second thing is that I think that even those of us who have tried to say, please, you know, don't ask me this, you can sometimes find yourself confusing a knowledge of say political history - which I will modestly claim some - to thinking that that tells you much about the future. Two quick examples: 1988, 500 times we must have said no sitting Vice President has been elected since Martin Van Buren. That was true. But George Bush got elected. Four years later, no one has ever been elected President in the modern age without first winning the New Hampshire primary; that was true until Bill Clinton did it. And to some extent, I think that even journalists who try to say, look, I can tell you what happened, find themselves tending to say, that's what happened, therefore, this is what's going to happen. And that's when the red light should go on.
TERENCE SMITH: In other words, wishful thinking? TONY SNOW: Not even wishful thinking, just not thinking at all, sort of intellectual sloppiness, saying, you know, that I will appeal to this, or if this pollster tells me what's going to happen in the future, there are plenty of embarrassments there, as well. I mean, look at -- from Harry Truman on, polls have had their bad days. ELEANOR CLIFT: I want to say a good word here for the public. I don't think the public expects us to be right all the time. And I think they do weigh a lot of this with a grain of salt. Despite all the predictions that the war was a disaster, the air war wouldn't work, public support held for the air war. And as my colleague, Jack Tremond, says, you know, if we were right all the time, they'd pay us a lot more. So, you know, let's take this a little bit with a smile. TERENCE SMITH: I'm tempted to ask if even you have kept track of those predictions over 15 years. What's your right and wrong percentage?
TERENCE SMITH: That's true and better than the chimp as well. ELEANOR CLIFT: That's right. TERENCE SMITH: That was put in there. Jeff. |
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| A pundit's temptation. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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JEFF GREENFIELD: Part of - I don't mean to be too harsh about this, but I do think that one of the reassuring things about all this, when people talk about the consequences -- I mean, there is a bad consequence in that; the more you do this kind of lip flapping, the less time there is for something that might be called information, much less analysis. But I think that increasingly, as we've seen more and more journalists participate in the equivalent of verbal food fights and Gong shows, I think the public treats it with about the same seriousness as they treat five guys in the back of the fire house or barber shop gabbing about, you know, who's going to win the NBA title. You know, maybe that's a good thing in the sense that the more the public says, you guys don't really know that much more than we do, but maybe eventually - eventually it will convince the journalistic community to lay off these predictions and to get back to what we're supposed to be doing, which is tell people what happened and maybe try to indicate why it happened and what to look for in the future. TONY SNOW: Jeff, although it's human nature for people when they encounter somebody who studies something to say, tell me what's going to happen, somebody studying the stock market. Tell me whether it's going to go, up or down. Who's going to win the NBA finals? JEFF GREENFIELD: Exactly. TONY SNOW: So there are people like that, but I think you're right; they look at it as just sort of a flash --
TERENCE SMITH: Eleanor, you have more than five seconds to respond to that. ELEANOR CLIFT: Right. Well, I think the public enjoys the five-second sound bites, and they know where to look to get more substantive information. And I think that predictions are part of the game of politics and the game of life, and, you know, I think we all ought to lighten up about it. TERENCE SMITH: All right. Final word, Tony. TONY SNOW: They're also a way to force somebody to summarize their feelings or analysis on something. So you can have the goofy prediction question, but a lot of times too you can have a long, thoughtful conversation, then try to force somebody to bring all their thoughts together. You get a prediction - it doesn't mean they're going to be right, but it might mean it's serious. TERENCE SMITH: All right. Thank you all three very much. ELEANOR CLIFT: Thank you. JEFF GREENFIELD: Thank you. |
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TERENCE
SMITH: From the Sunday political shows --
GEORGE
STEPHANOPOLOUS: We should be planning for ground troops now. It was
a mistake to take them off the table.
JOHN
McLAUGHLIN: Issue one: peace at hand!
TERENCE
SMITH: The current issue of the media magazine, Brill's Content,
tested the pundits' accuracy against that of Chippy the chimp, who batted
500, better than Fred Barnes and George Will. With the Kosovo agreement
in place, the pundits have begun conjuring the future of campaign 2000.
AL
HUNT: Mark, anyone with your wisdom and experience knows that picking
winners and losers at this juncture is the province of sports writers.
TERENCE
SMITH: Joining us to explore the perils of predictive journalism are
three seasoned pundits. Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor to
Newsweek Magazine who appears regularly on the "McLaughlin
Group"; Jeff Greenfield is a senior analyst for CNN, who has also
been a media critic for ABC and CBS; and Tony Snow, whom you just saw
apologizing to President Clinton, is the host of "Fox News Sunday"
and a syndicated columnist. Welcome to you all. 
ELEANOR
CLIFT, Newsweek: Well, first of all, I agree with Jeff; the economics
of the profession are going to bring us more and more predictions. I
think it's David Gergen who calls it "drive-by journalism."
It's cheaper. I've been doing the predictions now for, what, almost
15 years of the "McLaughlin Group," and it's the game of politics.
And I'd say there are predictions and there are predictions. And the
predictions that close out the "McLaughlin Group" are in the
spirit halfway of entertainment, frankly. They don't really, I don't
believe, set a frame work for a policy discussion. And I think the kind
of predictions that are worrisome are when a series of pundits predict
certain things that then become the conventional wisdom and the frame
work in which we discuss serious policy issues.
TONY
SNOW, "Fox News Sunday": Well, mainly because I was so wildly
wrong in my prediction about the use of air power. Until this war, air
power had been effective at sort of blowing up various military targets,
but it had effective in securing the end of a war; this was different.
Having been a critic of the President mainly in my syndicated column,
I figured, well, why not just go ahead and fess up. For one thing, I
think one of the problems we face in journalism is that we too seldom
confess to our errors, even though we, who are practicing journalists,
understand the shortcomings of the crowd -- it's not only PR but the
intellectually honest thing to do.
JEFF
GREENFIELD: Well, what makes Tony's gesture so remarkable - sort of
like throwing yourself on a hand grenade to save your colleagues in
wartime - is that one of the reasons why people do it is there's no
accountability. And if Tony Snow hadn't said, hey, you know what I was
wrong - it isn't as though there are some sanction for being wrong --
and I'm not talking specifically here about Tony - I mean, shortly before
President Clinton's inaugural his campaign staff in a spirit of lethal
vengeance collected all the videotapes of various pundits all through
1992 predicting that this is the end of Clinton, he's finished, he can't
win -- and the fact that this keeps happening - you know, unlike say
if a doctor - you know - the point is it's more serious - if a doctor
makes a screw-up, there's going to be a medical review. There is no
journalistic review that says, hey, you know what, as Brill's Content
told us recently, a chimpanzee out predicted a couple of the more prominent
Sunday pundits. Nobody loses a job because of it.
ELEANOR
CLIFT: Well, I think that most of the public relies on television to
get their news, and I think the pundits have put the face on today's
media and that I think we do, when we are wrong, add to the cynicism
that the public feels, and we do come across often as a bunch of know-it-alls,
pompous know-it-alls. And I must say I think Tony's gesture is a very
winning one. But the public loves people who apologize, who admit they
are wrong. I think other journalists, however, there is no penalty to
be paid if you're too tough. If you say the war is failing, the President
is going to be impeached and the western world is about to collapse,
that's fine. But if you say anything that is remotely positive towards
an administration, and I would say any administration, then you are
cast as soft.
TERENCE
SMITH: Tony Snow, we have to acknowledge that you were by no means alone
in predicting a bad outcome, and that included members of Congress and
others who were very skeptical about the President. But is there - and
let's go back to Jeff's point - is there a cost to being wrong in your
- in your mind, particularly in terms of the public?
TONY
SNOW: Terry, one of the other problems we've fallen into is not only
thinking that the past is destiny, but also that poll data constitute
destiny as well, and so you have a lot of people formulating opinions
or confidently making predictions based on things that are just made
up almost out of whole cloth or thin air.
ELEANOR
CLIFT: I haven't but Brill's Content has recently, and I'm doing
pretty well. I'm batting - you know - I think it's better than 500,
which is about a little bit better than the toss of a coin. It's what
you get when you look into the future.
JEFF
GREENFIELD: It's play. But I think that imposes an obligation. And we
have all gone out on the rubber chicken circuit, and people think somehow,
well, you've got to know what's going to happen, what's going to happen,
and I will say this: I think one of the temptations that you have to
resist is this: If you keep saying, I don't know, eventually people
are going to stop asking you even to do the work. And to some extent,
the folks who book these programs bear some responsibility for demanding
that kind of five-second entertaining World Wrestling Federation approach
to journalism. You know, give it me fast and colorful, instead of saying,
excuse me, this is a really complicated issue here; I can't give it
to you in five seconds, much less tell you it's going to happen the
day after tomorrow.