Speculation

By Gordon Hopkins When you only hear part of a story and must wait for the rest, especially when you don't know how long you may have to wait, I suppose you can't help but speculate. It is only natural to wonder about the whens and the wheres and the hows. And, above all, the whys.Speculation is an insidious enemy of good journalism. When lacking important details, the temptation is to speculate. For news, it is perfectly acceptable to broadcast or publish the speculation of experts, though news outlets should try and stick to experts, and avoid those quote unquote “experts.” But those news outlets should also emphasize that all this is just speculation. The problem of speculation in the news has gotten especially bad since the advent of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle. When I was a kid, news happened in the morning, at lunch time and in the evening, just before all the comedies and cop shows came on. And that was pretty much it. If there was important breaking news that didn't happen during the scheduled news hour, Walter Cronkite or Roger Mudd or one of those guys would interrupt “Chico and the Man” or “Columbo” and advise the world of this important news. Then they would conclude with “We will return when more details are available” and the audience could go back to watching our shows until something new broke.Nowadays, news stations have to fill all that air time, focusing on something that they don't have a lot of information about.So they have to speculate. The result is news stories with a lot of fat and very little meat.The big national news story today is, of course, the killing of UnitedHealthcare* CEO Brian Thompson Wednesday morning in New York City.Speculation is rife that the victim was killed because of the sort of things insurance companies do, like deny claims. Recent details uncovered certainly support that hypothesis, though it is still only speculation. Until these most recent discoveries, he could just have easily been killed by a jealous lover or because of gambling debts. For the sake of full disclosure, in another lifetime I once worked for two subsidiaries of UnitedHealth Group*, the umbrella company that also owns UnitedHealthcare. The first was United Behavioral Health, where I worked in the customer service phone bank, and, later, Ingenix (since renamed Optum), as an insurance fraud investigator.In that earlier job, I felt I was helping people. In the later job, I was trying to catch bad guys. In both cases, I felt I was doing something good.I don't bring this up to convince people I'm not a bad guy, despite having once worked for an insurance company. I will admit, even before the killing, I have always somewhat felt the need to justify my previous life as an insurance man. I bring it up because, on social media, response to the killing has been almost entirely unsympathetic toward the dead man and, indeed, quite ugly.Of course, now I am a journalist, perhaps one of the few professions even less respected then insurance. *The lack of spacing between words are not typos. That is how the companies' names are written. Like most marketing decisions, it has always baffled and irritated me.

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