You May Find This Blog Post Interesting

Or you may not.  Either way, I’m going to use it to complain a bit about a trend in journalism that annoys me, and which seems to be everywhere these days: the use of the weasel word “may” to manufacture news where there isn’t any.

Here’s an example of what I mean in a headline:

Scientist: H1N1 virus may be no worse than regular flu

Really?  Here’s a second headline—which I just made up—that says essentially the same thing:

Scientist: H1N1 virus may be worse than regular flu

And here’s a third:

Scientist: I don’t know whether H1N1 virus will be worse than regular flu or not, because I can’t see into the future.  I have an opinion, but experts guess wrong, just like everyone else.  But maybe the reporter had a deadline, and in this day and age there has to be a constant flow of news even if there’s nothing newsworthy to report, so here, have an article.

That something may happen isn’t news.  Almost anything you can imagine may happen.  It may rain somewhere in California three weeks from tomorrow.  The Cubs may win the World Series next year.  Aliens may attack the Earth this July 4th.  Or maybe none of those things will happen.  If the article quoted scientists willing to say that they believe the H1N1 virus won’t be be as bad as first thought—that might be news.  If it offered data to support the contention—that might be news, too.  But it doesn’t do either of those things.  It doesn’t even quote any particular scientist advancing the opinion cited in the headline.  This article seems to be nothing more than where several column inches went to die.  Given the much-discussed troubles of the journalism biz, is this really the time to be diluting the value of the news by filling it with airy, outsourced unsourced speculation, about this or anything else?

UPDATE:  My use of outsourced instead of unsourced in the original post above was a typo, but now it’s got me thinking.  In this tight economy, maybe we should be outsourcing speculation.  We could even offshore speculation to low-cost, high-volume pundits overseas.  We can ship them the speculation Americans won’t do, while keeping the skilled high-margin speculation here at home.  In a sense, we’re already doing this—I’m thinking of the BBC here, for example.