Speculation a news

There is more speculation in foreign news stories than on Wall St. A beautiful example is seen in a New York Times story, Jan. 27, 2016, under the headline in the Boston Globe, “China sends a ship — and a message. Some see mission of carrier fleet as signal to Trump.” Here’s the first sentence, with “could” used twice: “The Chinese military deployment of an aircraft carrier to patrol contested South China Sea could be seen as a challenge to US president-elect Donald Trump’s strident criticism of China and could complicate relations between the two nations, specialists said Tuesday.” If the reporter is not doing the speculating, he or she will credit some “observer,” or here, a “specialist.” Sometimes they are named. Most often they’re anonymous.

Read on in the story and you get the inevitable “seems likely” and the usual “tensions”: “The decision by Beijing to deploy the carrier group seemed likely to complicate an increasingly fractious relationship between China and the United States. Nowhere are those tensions more on display than in the South China Sea…..”

File under: Coulda, coulda, coulda.