Guessing Disguised as News

By Thomas Griffith

The press could cover better what has happened if it were not so preoccupied with trying to guess what is going to happen next. This occupational tic, this desire to sound "knowing" about the not yet knowable, is what makes so much journalism quickly forgettable. The urge is highly visible during the Reagan interregnum, with Washington reporters and columnists desperately inflating every little nod about future policies, or hint about appointments, from the Reagan camp.

The same desire to hunch the future led to the debacle of the pollsters at election time. In their own defense, pollsters have just about persuaded everyone that there was a dramatic change in voter opinion in the last week before the balloting. Even if this is true, however, of what use to anyone were the pollsters' "too close to call" findings just a week before an electoral landslide?

Overemphasis on the polls had some interesting consequences. Historians will debate how much Carter's irresolution and waffling stemmed from too much attention to Patrick Caddell's incessant and expensive opinion sampling. The Washington Post's Haynes Johnson blames himself and his press colleagues for basing so much coverage on polls, then writing learned analysis claiming to know what was on people's minds. Wrote Johnson: "As it turns out, reporters would have been better served by relying on their own legwork, which in turn produces their own political instincts."

Still, reader curiosity about the future may be insatiable: How else explain the popularity of astrology columns? Probably the most ambitious and serious attempt to hunch the future was the Carnegie Corporation-financed Commission on the Year 2000, a gathering of distinguished scholars directed by Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell. It met in the '60s but petered out by 1972. "It makes no sense to predict the future," says Bell. "There are too many contingencies. What you can do is identify relevant frameworks, and identify problems--but you don't know what will be done about them, which is the function of political will."

A lively new magazine called Next, published by a subsidiary of Litton Industries Inc., has found a popular niche by concentrating on "two, five or ten years down the road" and has doubled its initial circulation of 200,000 in its first year. Sometimes, to get attention, it asks unanswerable questions on its cover ("Will There Ever Be a Jewish President?"). Its current issue, hailing the 1980s, proclaims it the Decade to Remember, foreseeing "fat and not lean years," a revival of Yankee ingenuity, and major advances in medicine.

For its most serious prophecies, Next uses the Delphi method, a common-sense technique that was invented in 1950 at the Rand Corporation and classified secret for a decade. Experts answer questions anonymously; their answers are combined and shown to them; they are told who their fellow experts are, and then they answer the same questions again. Since they do not meet face to face, the most articulate or prestigious among them do not exert undue influence, and the discovery of how impressive their fellow experts are seems to make everyone weigh his answers more carefully the second time around. Using Delphi, Next polled 32 Government and nongovernmental experts and came up with a very readable piece on the possibility of nuclear war. The consensus: chances are low over the next four years but may double by the '90s. The most optimistic finding is that a global nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is least likely; more probable is a regional war that does not spread. Most probable: a nuclear Israel-Arab war, with Israel ruined but prevailing, and an India-Pakistan war with India winning.

However plausible the script by Next magazine's experts, Daniel Bell might point out that the unknowable ingredient remains political will. Experts they may be, but it is still only guesswork.

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