Perfect Hindsight

Lacking foresight, journalists excel at hindsight. Unable to deal with the present they disinter the past, to rewrite it. In this way, they can show how prescient, even prophetic they were. And they can blame everyone who did not see it coming.

Our journalists knew it was coming. If they didn’t know it was coming, someone somewhere did. The person who predicted the current calamity is a soothsayer, a prophet, a man or a woman who can read charts and do the math.

Anyway, Holman Jenkins offers some pithy remarks about today’s journalists, most of whom, sad to say, have become propagandists. Why would you want to report the news when you can be the news. 

But from the bottom of my heart, let me point out how genuinely worthless some journalists are as thinkers and critics when they venture beyond their job of getting quotes and facts right. The media is staffed with people for whom the hindsight fallacy is not a fallacy; it’s their métier. (You can see the same after every stock market crash; whoever was predicting a crash at the time—and somebody always was—is accorded seer status.)

As noted on this very blog, things could always have been better. They could always have been worse. The administration could have reacted faster. But then again, it could have reacted slower. And naturally, we are all obsessed with the president’s communications skills, or lack of same.

Everyone is saying that Trump should be less present, but then again, he looks at the ratings and decides that his ubiquitous presence is working. The governor of New York, speaking of great culture heroes, has been mercilessly lauded by the media and by anti-Biden Democrats. And yet, New York is leading the nation in coronavirus cases, to say nothing of coronavirus deaths. If Trump were in charge of New York they would be denouncing him as the worst governor the world had ever seen.

You would think that they would have tired of the rhetorical hyperbole, but apparently not.

Anyway, prediction is always more accurate with the benefit of hindsight. So says Jenkins, and he is clearly correct:

A pandemic is always potentially around the corner thanks to natural selection, but when one will actually arrive is a known unknown. Yes, everything could have been done by the Trump administration faster and sooner. That’s par for the course for the U.S. government, unfortunately (see: history). Mr. Trump’s own “messaging” (which in the meta world of journalists is more important than any concrete reality) has been its typical mess when the president is ad libbing. It is also low-consequence no matter how much the media tries to make it high consequence.

Jenkins thinks it’s about paradoxes. I would humbly suggest that it's more about contradictions. You decide:

Our world reveals itself through paradoxes. A president who does a fair impression of Pinocchio has been the vehicle for exposing the media’s own mendacity. A president rightly criticized for trafficking in conspiracy theories was the victim of one himself—and not promoted by a solitary guy with a Twitter account, but by the nation’s media, law enforcement and political institutions.