January – the months that heralds the start of the new year – brings with it the opportunity to look ahead and to look behind. Last year around this time, the folks at the podcast The World Next Week (brought to you by the Council on Foreign Relations) took their airtime to look ahead as to what the year 2012 would bring. During their glance forward, one member of that January 5, 2012, podcast said that he…
…wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of the top five stories we’ll be talking about next year.
The “this” mentioned by the on-air host was the threat of the Iranian government to close access to the Strait of Hormuz over sanctions from the European Union.
Now is the time where I look behind and execute my veridiction (my created word for the process of verifying predictions) on The World Next Week. I am going to make a linguistic leap and say that when the host said “next year”, that he was talking about the year 2012. Even though the podcast in question aired on the fifth day of 2012 and the phrase “next year” literally would mean 2013, I am still standing by my interpretation that the host was talking about 2012.
With that interpretation in mind, was he correct? Was the threat to close the Strait of Hormuz and curtail the export of oil from Iran one of the top five stories of the year.
In short, no.
According to Google, “this” was not one of the top ten trending news stories of the year.
Neither was “this” one of the top ten stories from Yahoo! News.
“This” also did not rank a mention in the top ten stories as ranked by the Associated Press.
In a year that held a Presidential election in the United States, a hurricane that battered the East Coast, a horrific shooting in a school, a fiscal cliff, and a guy breaking the sound barrier without a jet, a story about threats from Iran – that never happened anyway – was going to have a tough time grabbing people’s attention.
Form Your Troika 