Peter Schorsch
Remember the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report,” about Pre-Cogs predicting crimes before they happened so the PreCrime unit could swoop in and punish people before they did anything wrong? Well, apparently the Tampa Bay Times’ Adam Smith thinks that’s how responsible journalism should work, too.
You’ll find in Smith’s latest column precise reporting of a future lapse in Jeb Bush’s decorum when he says “our former governor will be looking into a camera in Cedar Rapids or Nashua and a reporter will ask him for the 20th time that day about something Bush considers trivial and/or stupid. Bush will say what’s on his mind and on camera will look, at best, arrogant and irritable and, at worst, like a real jerk.”
Talk about a political red ball!
The Rick Scott administration is in free fall, there are legitimate stories to cover about presidential politics, and the Florida Legislature is about to be gaveled into business, but Smith feels like none of that is worth covering. Rather, he needs to concoct a fictional bad moment in order to berate Bush for something he may or may not do a year from now.
Is what Smith offered what now passes as insightful political analysis?
If Smith feels so comfortable with his marvelous gift of foresight, he might want to spend a little time predicting how his newspaper is going to pull itself out of its subscriber death spiral. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it may take more than making up awkward moments as a platform for criticizing fictional behavior.
