Nobody knows what will happen next — and certainly not journalists

From the US presidential election to polling about the Albanese government, journalistic punditry is far more interested in telling us what will happen next rather than reporting on what has happened.

The facts, as Atlanta-based journalist and academic Nicole Carr says, are non-negotiable. But, she adds, framing is a choice. Political punditry in America and Australia, using the often unreliable tools of pattern recognition, correlation and recency bias, has opted to frame those non-negotiable facts into a predictive narrative of how the future will unfold.

This narrative gets massaged and delivered through agenda-setting panel talk shows, with viral grabs pumped out by social media algorithms.