It's been hard lately to ignore the fact that major elements in the electronic news media have stopped concentrating on the collection of information, and have instead focused on predicting the future.

It's not a good choice. For one thing, foretelling the future is a really tough job and most journalists have no obvious qualifications for the task.

These two facts haven't seemed to matter, however, and so the hosts of various television news programs continue to concentrate not on what they know, but rather on what they clearly don't know and probably can't know.

The other night, for example, one of the news channels began a program with two seemingly urgent questions. The first was whether President Bush is now determined to achieve "absolute power" and the second was whether the Bush administration could successfully "pack" the U.S. Supreme Court with extremely conservative justices.

Now, the phrase "absolute power" is not susceptible to multiple definitions. It means complete and unlimited power - power without any restriction. It would mean, for instance, the power to ignore the Constitution and its requirement for periodic elections.

Most Americans, one suspects, aren't much worried that George Bush is about to emerge as Ivan the Terrible.

Nonetheless, the show's host was intent on demonstrating that Bush, by authorizing a limited number of warrantless wiretaps as part of an ongoing foreign intelligence program, was actually heading down the road to "absolute power." The only issue for the host was whether "individual rights" were about to become either a distant memory or a footnote in American history.

There was absolutely no discussion on the actual elements of the law, no discussion of whether anyone had suffered injury and certainly no discussion as to what concerns may have influenced the content of statutes written in the 1970s when international conditions were far different than they are today.

As to the second issue, the alleged packing of the Supreme Court, almost all of the attention was devoted, not to what is knowable about the present members of the Supreme Court and the current nominee, Samuel Alito, but to what may or may not happen should yet another conservative take a place on the court.

This propensity to guess about the future, especially the truly scary possibilities, is often presented as a replacement for traditional fact-gathering. The result is that the American people are, more often than not, being told what to think before being given information that is worth thinking about.

Two recent examples illustrate the point.

News coverage of the current wave of bird flu have included inordinate amounts of alarming speculation on when and whether the virus will explode into a pandemic that could kill millions.

Now, a pandemic is a term that means a general, universal or worldwide epidemic. And while it's certainly possible there will soon be another pandemic, it is equally possible there won't.

What the public could use is more information about what has happened, and what people are doing about it, and less panic about what may happen.

Even when relatively straightforward events are involved, news coverage is often hopelessly skewed toward the unknowable.

The recent stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has produced a spate of stories focused on whether he can recover, the extent of the brain damage, what will happen if he doesn't recover, and so on. The answer to most of these concerns is unknowable and must await future developments, but that fact has done little to change the nature of the coverage.

Some of these worries are surely understandable, but it increasingly seems it is no longer enough for a reporter to calmly report what is known. Often, fevered guesses about the future must be included. The result of the misplaced emphasis is that potentially important elements of a given story may be ignored or overlooked.

Thankfully, it wouldn't be all that difficult to restore a better journalistic balance. All that really needs to happen is to reapply some simple journalistic principles. Closer attention to the who, where, what, when and why of a news event would leave much less time for the kind of unfounded fortune telling that seems better suited to alarm and frighten viewers than to inform them.

Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post's editorial-page staff. His columns appear on Wednesday.