Let me expand on this idea that you can't lose. It's not confined to the media. Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced it wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory. It's fascinating that even though the intellectual stance of the postmodern deconstructionist era is against theory, particularly overarching theory, in reality what every academic wants to express is theory. This is, in part, aping science, but it's also an escape hatch. Your close textual reading of Jane Austen could well be wrong, and could be shown to be wrong by a more knowledgeable critic. But your theory of radical feminization and authoritarian revolt in the work of Jane Austen--with reference to your own childhood feelings--is untouchable. Similarly, your analysis of the origins of the First World War could be debated by other authorities. But your New Historicist essay, which includes your own fantasy about what it would be like if you were fighting in the first war...well, that's unarguable. And even better, how about a theory of the origin of warfare beginning with Paleolithic cave men? That'sreally unarguable.
A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. Religious subjects are in disfavor these days, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. You can argue it interminably. And it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics--and probably, nobody ever will.
Then there is the speculative work of anthropologists like Helen Fisher, who claim to tell us about the origins of love or of infidelity or cooperation by reference to other societies, animal behavior, and the fossil record. How can she be wrong? These are untestable, unprovable stories.
And lest anyone imagine things are different in the hard sciences, consider string theory, which has been the dominant physical theory for nearly 20 years. More than one generation of physicists has labored over string theory. But--if I understand it correctly, and I may not--string theory cannot be tested or proven or disproven. Although some physicists are distressed by the argument that an untestable theory is nevertheless scientific, who is going to object, really? Face it, an untestable theory is ideal! Your career is secure!
In short, there is now widespread understanding that so long as you speculate, you can't lose.
Now, nowhere is it written that the media need be accurate, or useful. They haven't been for most of recorded history. So now they're speculating....so what? What is wrong with it?
1. Tendency to excess. Mere talk makes drama and spectacle unlikely--unless the talk becomes heated and excessive. So it becomes excessive. Not every show features the Crossfire-style food-fight, but it is a tendency on all shows.
2. Crisis-ization of everything possible. Most speculation is not compelling because most events are not compelling--gosh, I wonder what will happen to the German mark? Are they gonna get their labor problems under control? This fact promotes the well-known media need for a crisis. Crisis in the German mark! Uh-oh! Look out! Crises unite the country, draw viewers in large numbers, and give everyone something to speculate about. Without a crisis, the talk soon degenerates into a debate about whether the refs should have used instant replay on the last football game. So there is a tendency to hype urgency and importance and be-there-now when it's really not appropriate. Witness the interminable scroll at the bottom of the screen about the Queen Mother's funeral. Whatever the Queen Mother's story may be, it is not a crisis. I have even watched a scroll of my own divorce roll by for a couple of days on CNN. It's sort of flattering (even though they got it wrong.) But it is surely not vital breaking news.
3. Superficiality as a norm. Gotta go fast. Hit the high points. On to our next guest. Speculation adds to superficiality.
4. Endless presentation of conflict may interfere with genuine issue resolution. There is evidence that the television food-fights not only don't represent the views of most people--who are not so polarized--but may tend to make resolution of actual disputes more difficult in the real world. At the very least, they obscure the recognition that we resolve disputes every day. Compromise is much easier from relatively central positions than it is from extreme and hostile, conflicting positions: Greenpeace vs. the Logging Industry.
5. Interminable chains of speculation pave the way to litigationabout breast implants, hysteria over Y2K and global warming, articles in theNew Yorker about currents of death, and a variety of other outcomes that are not, by any thoughtful view, helpful. There comes to be a perception--convenient to the media--that nothing is, in the end, knowable for sure, when in fact, that's not true.
Let me point to a demonstrable bad effect of the assumption that nothing is really knowable. Whole-word reading was introduced by the education schools of the country without, to my knowledge, any testing of the efficacy of the new method. It was simply put in place. Generations of teachers were indoctrinated in its methods. As a result, the U. S. has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world. The assumption that nothing can be known with certainty does in truth have terrible consequences.
As G. K. Chesterton said (in a somewhat different context), "If you believe in nothing, you'll believe in anything." That's what we see today. People believe in anything.