The New York Times recently published an opinion piece by Christy Wampole (associate professor, French and Italian), in which she looks at the phenomenon of speculative journalism relating especially to coverage of U.S. politics, and the possible explanations for it. Wampole shares examples of headlines in publications such as the The Washington Post, Fox News, and The Guardian.
She writes, “All this speculation raises a number of new questions in my mind: If this is just clickbait, to what impulse are we responding? Do we simply enjoy the exercise that speculation offers our imaginations? Is the current state of things so unstable, or unbearable, that we now prefer potentiality to actuality? Does speculation provide the same anticipatory thrills as a wrapped gift or the ascent of that first hill on a roller coaster? Is the best journalist now the most clairvoyant one, the one who tells us not how it was but how it will be? These are all speculative questions (as is, you may have noticed, the headline of this piece), but their location here, in an opinion piece, marks them as the open-ended guesswork of a person whose job isn’t to report what happened.”
Read the full article titled “What Is the Future of Speculative Journalism?” here
