The Journalism of Expectations

Jeff Jarvis
Whither news?
Published in
5 min readJan 13, 2022

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Beside journalism’s addiction to prediction lies another comorbidity: its presumption to set expectations.

Of course, we are well familiar with this co-occuring condition in coverage of politics, where journalists think they bring value to public discourse — which they do not — when they predict who will win an election. In the process, they set expectations about what a candidate must do to meet the pundit’s…

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Jeff Jarvis
Whither news?

Blogger & prof at CUNY’s Newmark J-school; author of Geeks Bearing Gifts, Public Parts, What Would Google Do?, Gutenberg the Geek