How ‘Obsessive Futurism’ in the Media Reinvents our Future
“Machine Outsmarts Human.”
Ira Chinoy, a journalism colleague from University of Maryland, captured the “outsmarting” nugget above in his new book, Predicting the Winner: The Untold Story of Election Night 1952 and the Dawn of Computer Forecasting (Potomac Books, 2024). With enthralling detail, Chinoy describes the November 4, 1952 debut of Remington Rand’s UNIVAC computer employed at CBS TV studios in New York. UNIVAC’s mission was to forecast the Dwight Eisenhower-Adlai Stevenson presidential contest.
Predicting the Winner: Ira Chinoy’s book on the first computer forecasting in the 1952 Presidential election.
UNIVAC’s eight-ton computer was actually housed in Philadelphia—too heavy to move—its predictions broadcast via remote camera to Walter Cronkite and his crew in a TV studio above Grand Central Terminal. Similarly, NBC premiered a much smaller computer, the Monrobot, a “scientific brain” bowing at the network’s 8-H studio at Rockefeller Center.
Executives at both NBC and CBS were nervous, but decided to feature these “fearsome contraptions,” as one NBC announcer, Bill Henry, called them, as part of America’s much anticipated first televised election night coverage. Tensions throughout the evening were high.
A smiling former President Harry S. Truman (left) holds a copy of the famous Chicago Daily Tribune paper declaring “Dewey Defeats Truman”. The others in the photo are unknown, and the event is unknown; but the photo is good clear quality. This was post-presidential.
“The new medium of television had to be seen as credible, especially in the crucible of election night,” Chinoy wrote. “The previous presidential election night —1948—carried uncomfortable memories of gaffs by human pollsters and journalists…with premature reporting of election-night outcomes that were in line with pollsters’ predictions—and wrong.”
The most infamous gaffe was Chicago Daily Tribune’s election night headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” coupled with Truman’s hearty guffaw as he held up the newspaper for an iconic ‘jokes on you’ photograph distributed worldwide.
Would machines outsmart humans? No one knew the answers in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But as computers, predictive algorithms, and today’s AI-driven neural networks became addictive staples of American life, our belief in technological mastery overcoming the limitations of human brains became undeniable.
As it turned out, the UNIVAC failed in its first attempts to forecast the 1952 election (because its human operators believed its forecast of a landslide must be wrong). And by the time Rand’s UNIVAC operators accurately crunched the numbers again to predict Eisenhower’s landslide, human forecasters at the network had already announced it. Similarly, NBC’s Monrobot, produced by New Jersey’s Monroe Calculating Machine Company, got its 30 seconds of fame by forecasting the odds favoring Eisenhower shortly after 10 pm, just a few minutes before UNIVAC chimed in. “I’m delighted,” CBS’s serious analyst Eric Severeid admitted. “The UNIVAC, our machine competitor, was wrong for a while and we were consistently right with a human voice—or we’d all be victims of technological unemployment pretty soon.”
Where Fact and Fiction Converge
Ira Chinoy, author of Predicting the Winner
Chinoy’s foray into computer forecasting crosses over into the themes of my novel, The Logoharp. As he describes the dawn of American computer forecasting, Chinoy also documents reasons for the decades-long erosion of public trust in the media. Between 2005 and 2022, for example, 2500 local and regional newspapers folded in the United States, about a quarter of the total. Chinoy describes the rise of news “deserts,” leaving vast sectors of the public with “digital alternatives that did not come close to replacing what was lost.” Biased reporting and outright propaganda complement bitter partisan predictions that (too often) merge into headlines. And there is the relentless competition “to be first” among broadcast companies while leaving reading and newspapers in the dust. All these trends produce “funnels” of disinformation, but also public anxiety about the future unknown. What will happen? What can happen? Fear produces anxiety, a kind of bracketed [ ] emptiness; public anxiety in turn fills a gap where logic and rational thought should be evaluating fairly reported, factual realities of the day. (Funny how a meticulously researched non-fiction book about electoral prediction could map so beautifully into my novel about political prediction 100 years from now!)
Fast forward to China in 2011-2012
I was teaching at the International College Beijing, a Ph.D. lecturer of media history, basic reporting, science writing, and film. It became clear to me from absorbing State-controlled media that partisan prediction and “good news” had become a cornerstone of Chinese society. Hu Jin Tao, then the Chinese Communist Party General Secretary, presided over a China of continuous prosperity and growth. Hu favored policies building his “scientific” vision of a “Harmonious Socialist Society,” both prosperous and relatively free of internal conflict. True, the authorities were still cracking down periodically on ethnic minority protests in Xinjiang and Tibet, along with isolated social disturbances and dissidents like the artist Ai Wei Wei demanding great political freedoms. But overall, the atmosphere in Beijing seemed calm, stable. I even recall the Dean of my College welcoming me by saying he wanted a more open academic environment, where students could learn concepts of media expression and practice from all over the world, including the West.
A year later, in 2013, things changed again. I watched Beijing-aligned political bosses in Hong Kong quash the efforts of a powerful telecom entrepreneur, Ricky Wong Wai-Kay, to win a contested free-to-air TV license. Wong’s original plan was to promote quality television programming —historical dramas, contemporary Asian stories, news, political commentary—over the airwaves at his HKTV channel without State censorship. When his application was rejected, thousands of Hong Kong’s citizens rose up in protest.
Chinese sign in Hong Kong saying “Oppose Capitalism. Occupy Central!”
Hong Kong police confront protestors
The crowds included a slew of actors, writers and television people; there were opposing demonstrators holding big character signs supporting the existing Hong Kong regime. My graduate students from University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Studies Centre covered these protests with pocket recorders, TV and video cameras blazing. Within a year, citizen anger morphed into a full-blown “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” (OCLP) democracy movement of tens of thousands staging sit-ins in the central business districts of Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok. Demonstrators blocked Hong Kong traffic for 79 days, deploying umbrellas to battle police pepper spray (OCLP was also called “The Umbrella Movement.”)
At issue in 2014 was universal suffrage and the attempts to make the nomination and elections of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive and Legislative Council members free and fair according to international standards. Instead, Beijing’s National People’s Congress issued a decision proposing “reforms” in the Hong Kong electoral system that effectively turned executive candidates into mainland puppets. Not only did government officials denounce the protests as “illegal” and a “violation of the rule of law,” Chinese State media claimed repeatedly that the West had instigated the protests; that Hong Kong was subject to the interference of “black hands,” and “deaths and injuries and other grave consequences” would surely follow. As Beijing tightened reins on the protestors, State media followed with dire predictions:
Illegal assembly in Hong Kong leads to clashes
By KAHON Chan in Hong Kong (China Daily) Updated: 2014-09-29 03:31
“The Occupy Central protest spun out of control in Hong Kong on Sunday as the local government appealed to organizers to end the gathering in the interest of the city and the safety of participants.
“The HKSAR government is resolute in opposing the unlawful occupation actions by Occupy Central. The police shall continue to handle the situation in accordance with the law,” Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said at a news conference.
Dozens of tear gas canisters were fired at protesters assembling near the central government offices after 6 pm. In spite of occasional retreats, the blockade that halted traffic in the heart of the city persisted into the night…”
___________________
There were no deaths at that time.. This changed in 2019 with further protests; four demonstrators in Hong Kong committed suicide. By December 14, 2014, after multiple arrests, the leaders of Occupy Central turned themselves in. All mention of the movement
Democracy Protestors flood Hong Kong’s Central District
was scrubbed from Chinese social media. In 2017, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy legislators, refusing to take a standard loyalty oath, were disqualified from Parliament. By 2020, Beijing issued the stringent National Security Law that made illegal a wide range of dissenting acts in Hong Kong, among them calls for secession, undermining the authority of the central government, collusion with foreign forces, and terrorism. The Hong Kong I recall was no longer a “one country two systems” semi-autonomous model of finance and fashion. Chilling effects on political speech, thought, media, and education had altered the city – possibly forever.
When “Reporting the Future” becomes the Future…and the Birth of The Logoharp
As I watched these events unfold I began to think that journalism had wandered too far from its original intent. Whether it’s Chinese state media or our peculiar American brand of bickering partisan media, predicting consequence and the political future of a state becomes a powerful force to influence and shape the state. Cherry picking facts and leaving out others, weaponizing parenthetical items that seem hardly worth public attention, and using the internet, social media, broadcast and newspapers as a direct mouthpiece for powerful (and often arrogant, selfish and delusional) actors and their agenda: These days, “predicting the future” seems like a closed loop — Party, power, media mouthpieces, all in cahoots.
The Logoharp depicts the fate of a young American journalist who foresees the reports the future for China in the 22nd century
Another way to say this is that the much-revered “old ways” of journalism— reporting and verifying facts in the present tense, providing context, detail and a “balance” of viewpoints, and, most of all, monitoring power independently while leaving much of the interpretive thinking to citizens: all these qualities have seemingly evaporated into the “news” of what may or will happen. For those interested in “classic’ journalism, I recommend Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s The Elements of Journalism (2001, 2007, Three Rivers Press, New York). It’s a simple, compact Bible of what journalism should be. Thoughtful readers will see how much current reporting has deviated from the principles outlined in this book.
Today’s media predict, even harp on consequences. The future is outlined, intimated, forecast, thus shaping and influencing what that future will be. In my view, this tilt toward obsessive futurism is partially to blame for the rapid erosion of public trust in our airwaves, our newspapers, and even in the “objective” national news sources. You’ll see in The Logoharp that I’ve labeled this tilt toward incessant prediction as “Reverse Journalism” or a “journalism of future prospects.” As heroine Naomi describes it:
“I’ve been accepted as a candidate for Reverse Journalism. An
RJ researches, extracts and reports the most likely scenarios
of the future that will benefit Mother Country, its children
(the masses) and, at times, the Ameriguan subsidiaries.”
With homage to Ira Chinoy (he’s an expert in computer-assisted reporting and research): Although “machines outsmarting humans” today certainly have legitimate roles in play in scads of applications in the social sciences, hard sciences, the military, and more, computational polling and forecasting that attempts to take the pulse of unruly public behavior (as in American elections) appear in many instances less reliable than traditional methods of reporting in the field. Perhaps the networks rely on predictive “tools” because it’s expected; it glues eyeballs and alleviates audience anxiety, providing a window for entertainment, the “yeah we got it right” to “oh no,” and then the proverbial “walk back” when predictions go wrong. But our era of inventing and reinventing the future, or trying to, certainly isn’t limited to elections and public crises. Invariably the aftermath goes on and on. Increasingly, every action, every newsworthy item on the public agenda appears like a handicapped contender in a horse race.
Naomi ‘Reports the Future’ She’s a ‘Reverse Journalist.’
After I left China in 2012 and Hong Kong in 2013, I began outlining a story about a vulnerable young American writer who embraces her transformation as a ‘Reverse Journalist’ (RJ) in China, the dominant global power of the 22nd century. It was easy to extrapolate my experiences of “obsessive futurism” in today’s media to create Naomi, a character wedded to her moral conscience but also deeply disappointed by a Chinese lover’s betrayal. In the story, Naomi makes deep friendships with both men and women as she is surgically transformed into an armored cyborg who detects both State instructions along with mysterious voices of the future in her Logoharp, an AI-powered neural device. The word Logo comes from the Greek word, Logos, which means, roughly, the “process of an unfolding universe” or the principle of divine order. The Logoharp doubles the size of Naomi’s brain, allowing her to listen and speak in 104 world languages, but it also introduces obedience to State instructions and “unintentional contradiction” that wages war on Naomi’s conscience. As she describes it:
“Deliberately, willingly, I’ve decided to pursue this [RJ] career instead
of medicine. The title, Reverse Journalist, sounds glorious
and backward, like a Reverse Engineer. RJs deconstruct reality
and remake it into pleasurable form. We’re not like conventional
journalists who haplessly report and announce random social
and political events of yesterday or today. Instead, we seek
the truth of probable outcomes, scripting events to glorify and
sustain the health of the Party and its constituents.”
Sounds like what goes on today? Perhaps. As a conflicted character, Naomi is seduced by the idea of being “embraced in a Harmonious Society and warm bosom” in China. She wants, most of all, to invent “good news” that will “reshape our social skin.” But eventually, with the help of her surgeon and journalist friends, she discovers a system of “harmonious” and dream-like termination of millions in the name of sustainability and the planet’s Life Clock. Naomi rebels. Long-repressed human memories emerge. And the rest isn’t silence. She acts. Her rebellion produces unintended consequences for the people she loves, for her body, and for the social systems she’s vowed to protect.
I welcome all readers to explore the world of The Logoharp. Even the slightest resemblance to the “reverse journalism” of today is purely…intentional.
#
