It will be another year of constantly changing opinions

If I were writing a horror film about the news business (not so hard to imagine these days), I would invent a diabolical machine called the "Opinion Accelerator."

The Accelerator would take news items and spin them through a network of amplifiers: A story that went in at the emotional level of one decibel would come out at a thousand. The Accelerator would process just one story at a time, but it would be so loud that it drowned out everything else -- until it was replaced by another story, equally deafening.

When the Accelerator really got humming, it would drive people crazy: That would be the hook for my horror movie. It would make a presidential candidate seem unbeatable and then, six months later, make that same candidate look like a loser. It would convince analysts that a faraway war was a cakewalk, then make the identical war seem utterly lost, and then winnable again.

As the Accelerator pumped information around the globe, it would play multiple roles: The amped-up network would be the driver of global capitalism and, at the same time, the command-and-control system for global terrorists. It would convince Muslims that every Western mention of Islam was a profanation -- that calling a teddy bear "Muhammad" was a deadly crime, say. And as an equal-animosity spin machine, it would terrify the West that all Muslims were plotting jihad. It would magnify rage, without adding clarity.

Oops, I'm sorry. I think someone already invented my Opinion Accelerator. It's called the Internet.

As the new year begins, we are living in this horror-movie world of supercharged information. News spins so fast on the Web that people seem to have a cocksure opinion about everything, for 15 minutes. Looking back over 2007, it's fascinating to see how convinced people were of things that turned out to be wrong.

Iraq was the most obvious example of opinion reversal. Through the middle of the year, Americans seemed to have decided that the war was a disaster. In early summer, Washington politicians in both parties were so rattled they were all but running for the exits. President Bush's surge of 30,000 U.S. combat troops was widely viewed as the act of an isolated leader who had lost touch with reality. Then the numbers began to turn around in Iraq: Violence dropped sharply and Iraq fell out of the national conversation. What had seemed a lost cause was viewed as so successful that it was a bore.

Iran, too, was a land of shattered opinions. That was especially true for U.S. intelligence analysts, who were convinced until midsummer that the Islamic republic was hellbent on building a nuclear weapon and then, by December, judged with "high confidence" that the Iranians had actually halted their bomb-making program back in 2003. The Accelerator put these judgments on steroids: We were going to war with Iran one week, declaring surrender the next. It's not the Opinion Accelerator, you say. Facts change, polls change -- and opinions change along with them. And that's true enough. But what's different now is the way each transitory moment is spun so that it seems immutable.

If 2007 tested our mental compasses, just wait. The one certainty about 2008 is that it will be a year of change. A black man or a woman may be elected president of the United States. A resurgent China will celebrate its new dominance with a showy Olympics. America's war in Iraq, win or lose, will be winding down by year-end.

The Accelerator will be working overtime this year, too. What seems absolutely certain in May may turn out to be totally wrong by November. Just be glad you don't have to make a living expressing opinions.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group