Every news broadcast, every opinion column, every cable news panel seems to include someone confidently telling you what's going to happen next. The election will swing this way. The economy will crash by summer. That country will definitely invade. We consume these predictions like weather forecasts, assuming the experts know something we don't.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: they almost never do. News predictions fail at rates that would get you fired from almost any other job. Yet we keep listening, keep worrying, keep making decisions based on forecasts with track records worse than coin flips. Understanding why this happens—and what to do about it—might be the most liberating media literacy skill you can develop.

The beautiful thing about predictions is that they're testable. Someone says unemployment will hit 8% by December, or a particular candidate will win by ten points. These claims have expiration dates. The less beautiful thing is that almost nobody tracks them—including the pundits themselves.

Researcher Philip Tetlock spent decades studying expert predictions and found that the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. Political pundits, economic forecasters, foreign policy analysts—their confident predictions performed barely better than random chance. The more famous the expert, the worse they often did. Confidence and accuracy turned out to be inversely related.

You can do this tracking yourself. When a commentator makes a specific prediction, write it down. Set a calendar reminder for when it should come true. You'll discover something remarkable: the confident voices you trusted are wrong constantly. Once you see the pattern, those breathless predictions lose their power over your attention and your anxiety.

Takeaway

Expertise in understanding a domain doesn't translate into expertise in predicting its future. Track predictions yourself for a few months, and you'll never consume forecasts the same way again.

If predictions are so unreliable, why do news organizations keep making them? Because uncertainty doesn't perform well. A headline reading "Expert Predicts Market Crash" generates clicks. "Expert Says Nobody Really Knows What Markets Will Do" does not.

News operates in an attention economy where certainty—even false certainty—captures eyeballs. Pundits who hedge their statements, acknowledge complexity, and admit the limits of their knowledge sound wishy-washy compared to those who speak with conviction. The confident predictor gets invited back. The humble analyst gets replaced by someone willing to play the game.

There's also a psychological dimension. We want to believe the future is knowable because uncertainty is uncomfortable. Predictions offer the illusion of control—if we know what's coming, we can prepare. News organizations aren't forcing this product on unwilling consumers. They're supplying what our anxious brains demand: the comfortable fiction that someone, somewhere, has figured out tomorrow.

Takeaway

The incentive structure of media rewards confidence over accuracy. The pundits who sound most certain are often the least reliable—because certainty itself is the product being sold.

Here's the liberating part: you can get enormous value from news without the prediction component. The actual journalism—verified facts about what has happened, context about current conditions, explanations of how systems work—that's genuinely useful. It's the forecasting layer bolted on top that's mostly noise.

Train yourself to notice when coverage shifts from reporting to prediction. Words like "could," "might," "experts expect," and "analysts predict" are your cues. When you spot them, mentally translate: "This is speculation presented as insight." You don't have to stop reading, but you can stop giving these sections the weight of established fact.

The goal isn't cynicism—it's appropriate calibration. A piece explaining why inflation rose last quarter gives you genuine understanding. A piece predicting where inflation will be in six months gives you anxiety about something nobody actually knows. Consume the former. Let the latter wash over you like background noise. Your blood pressure will thank you, and your understanding of the world won't suffer at all.

Takeaway

Separate reporting from forecasting in everything you read. The facts about yesterday are often solid. The predictions about tomorrow are almost always guesses dressed up as expertise.

The prediction racket persists because it serves everyone's short-term interests except yours. Pundits get airtime, networks get viewers, and audiences get the temporary comfort of feeling informed about the future. The only loser is accuracy—and the person lying awake worrying about predictions that probably won't happen.

You can opt out without opting out of being informed. Focus on understanding current conditions rather than speculated futures. When someone tells you what's coming next, remember: they've probably been wrong before, they'll probably be wrong again, and you can simply choose not to carry that weight.