Too Much Speculation

For the most part, the 24-hour news cycle is actually quite a good thing - people can dip in to the news when they want, get a quick update on everything, and drop back out again. That's during normal times, of course.

During extraordinary times, though, there's a problem - everyone is focussed on one topic, everyone is desperate for information, but there isn't actually anything to report. The news stations can't really report on much else, because of their audience's monomaniacal focus on that one topic, but they have to fill 24 hours with nothing.

And as a consequence, they proceed to fill the airwaves with lots of experts of various stripes who proceed to speculate at some length about what might happen. The problem being that one of two things is true: (1) either they're not privy to what is going to happen, in which case their expertise is limited in the key area of interest; or (2) they are privy to the next steps but aren't able to reveal that information ahead of time, in which case they can't comment on the key area of interest.

Meanwhile, of course, there are all the other talking heads that the media channels get on because the actual experts aren't available. And so we have the madness of Nigel Farage, or Caprice, or Stanley Johnson being asked to opine on a topic that they know bugger all about.

Finally, starved of real information, social media and informal networks of course rush in to fill the void - but they can't actually fill it with real information, so what you get (if you're lucky) is people's well-meaning best guesses.

The upshot of all of this is that it is really easy to just let yourself saturate in nonsense, misinformation, and endless speculation. Which can be really unhealthy.

All of which is a long-winded way to say I won't be commenting on how I foresee any of this to go, I won't be commenting on the political responses (either from Boris or Nicola, nor even Donald), and so on. I probably will comment on how we're getting on, but it will almost entirely be focused on the past tense - even locally, the future is too unclear to comment sensibly.