THE most reviled assignment in every newsroom at Christmas is the dreaded `Review of the Year’.
The antipathy of journalists at the very mention of it is out of all proportion to the actual task.
Granted, it is more onerous in a daily newspaper than a weekly, with the former requiring 312 editions of your publication must be condensed into just a few pages to the latter’s 52; but, unlike most articles we produce, the information is already there, the facts already verified, the context by now established.
The problem, more often than not is the difficulty of compressing a year’s worth of news into the relatively small space available. If you’re not careful you can have reached your word limit by March and have to go back and cut out 75 per cent of your painstaking work.
The thing is, as a reader, they’re often the most fascinating part of the Christmas papers – seeing the year laid out in one coherent summary, complete with the odd nugget of news you missed or forgot happened.
But if anything, I prefer the predictions for the year ahead. Every year, I make a point of listening to the panel of expert correspondents on Radio 4, assembled from their teams across the globe, who give their assessments of what the year ahead will bring.
In truth, they are not usually that earth-shattering. What senior journalist, at the top of their profession, who has spent a career building up their reputation and is trained to carefully seek out facts and burrow their way to a verifiable truth, is going to stake all that on a wild forecast of an unlikely future?
Usually when you look back a year on to see how their predictions turned out they were largely on the money.
Of course that was until 2016 pushed the world wildly off its axis and saw the mild yet informed expert predictions for the year end up resembling the ludicrously inaccurate twenty-first century interpretations of the prophesies of Nostradamus – except in this case the doom was actually happening in the real world and the calm was the fantasy written down for posterity on the printed page.
2016 even saw even plague and pestilence that no one saw coming in the form of the Zika virus which threatened to derail the Olympic Games in Rio.
Like the first horseman of the apocalypse, the World Health Organisation declared it a global public health emergency in February, and the year slid from there inexorably into chaos and seething hatred.
A quick flick through the national and international newspaper predictions for 2016 almost makes one chuckle at the sweet naivety of the collective vision for the year ahead.
Few people predicted the United Kingdom would actually exit the EU, with most pundits trusting the preternatural ability of then prime minister David Cameron (remember him?) to escape from awkward scrapes by the skin of his teeth in true `Just William’ fashion. One (a Leave supporter) lugubriously gave him a win by “five or six percentage points”.
Some did foresee `Brexit’ coming to pass, but no one foretold the poisonous atmosphere that would be created, the upsurge in racism, vicious verbal clashes between the left and right as each was pulled to its extreme, the implosion of the British Labour Party, and, most tragically of all, the murder of an elected politician.
An extensive - if not exhaustive - examination of the predictions for the US presidential election have failed to throw up a single person who contemplated a Donald Trump presidency as even an outside possibility. No one even thought he would make it to be Republican Party nominee (which arguably he didn’t when you consider how many senior figures disavowed him).
If the future was created on the basis of a consensus of `experts’, Hillary Clinton would now be President-elect, having narrowly beaten off a challenge from Marco Rubio (who?).
In the tasteless list of likely celebrity deaths in 2016, US musician Prince did not even feature, still less did anyone expect that the deeply devout and vocally anti-drugs megastar would pass away, alone, from an opiate overdose.
The most poignant vision of the future that was never to be, in a week that has seen atrocity piled on atrocity in the final battle for Aleppo, was the general consensus that this would be the year of a Syrian ceasefire.
As 2016 draws to close, it is a world away from 2015. And, even possessing the `review of the year’ knowledge of how the cards have fallen, it seems impossible to predict what that means for all of us in 2017.
@BimpeIN
