The comments on a recent post by Dave at Hit and Run, jumping off Jim Henley’s got me thinking about the perennially bemoaned fact that we have a large class of pundits who specialize in making predictions and projections, that many of them seem to have a near infallible knack for getting things grievously wrong, and that essentially nobody is actually held accountable for this.

One thought, if I can be forgiven for donning my Neil Postman hat for a second, is that this is a function of the news cycle. An op-ed column needs a news hook. The Sunday chatter shows, whatever topic they’re covering, are going to be asking their guests some variant on the question: “How does recent development X affect the situation?” But there’s always a “recent development X,” and because the unexpected—what runs counter to what had been seen as the prevailing trend—is more likely to count as newsworthy, these will often point in different directions. And, more to the point, it’s just unlikely that whatever happened this week is going to be a major determinant of how a situation unfolds over the long term, relative to more boring background conditions. A format that encourages pundits to extrapolate from the latest news item, then, will tend to frequently yield badly wrong conclusions. The lack of accountability may just be the upshot of people’s recognizing this, and not especially expecting their writers or guests to be correct so much as interesting.