Interesting, as usual, and absolutely true of sports preview shows. But it really seems that your issue is with the need to fill airtime for all of this coverage, all day long. Same with the political talk shows. Back in the Walter Cronkite era, pre-cable, there was just 1 hour of nightly news coverage on TV, to sum up the day's events as you described. If Cronkite and the other broadcasters had to fill up 4 or 8 hours of news reporting, scheduled for every day of the week irregardless of whether anything of importance was even happening, they also would have been left with no choice but to fill that idle time with speculations and what-ifs. Times and entertainment habits have changed, for better or worse.
Interesting, as usual, and absolutely true of sports preview shows. But it really seems that your issue is with the need to fill airtime for all of this coverage, all day long. Same with the political talk shows. Back in the Walter Cronkite era, pre-cable, there was just 1 hour of nightly news coverage on TV, to sum up the day's events as you described. If Cronkite and the other broadcasters had to fill up 4 or 8 hours of news reporting, scheduled for every day of the week irregardless of whether anything of importance was even happening, they also would have been left with no choice but to fill that idle time with speculations and what-ifs. Times and entertainment habits have changed, for better or worse.
You make a good point, but "what if" journalism isn't reporting. It's astrology masquerading as news .