Peering Into a Slightly Cracked Crystal Ball

In the tradition of Jeanne Dixon, Nostradamus and Douglas MacArthur, I offer these predictions for the new year:

Fox News Channel will announce that correspondent Geraldo Rivera’s mysterious disappearance in Afghanistan had “nothing whatever to do” with the channel’s sudden realization that it was paying several million dollars per year to a liberal.

A woman somewhere will have a satisfactory customer-service experience with her cable company.

Peeved at network TV’s attempt to poach one of its stars for a sitcom, cable’s Food Network will fight back by creating a cooking show for Tony Danza. “Toast and Stuff With Tony D” will target “people who don’t really like food,” as well as “Danza’s vast and fiercely loyal fan base.”

Michael Jackson will announce that as a gesture of love to his country, he is offering zero-percent financing on his “Invincible” CD.

Allowing that “even I’m starting to get a little sick of myself,” Oprah Winfrey will not be the cover photo subject of an issue of her magazine, probably in July or August. Competing women’s magazines, even Rosie and Martha Stewart Living, will seize the opportunity to put Oprah on their covers.

The new talk show Winfrey is spinning off, fronted by her near-co-host Dr. Phil, will rocket to the top of the syndicated-program ratings. Then Dr. Phil will wake up from that October dream and realize he has self-esteem issues he needs to take care of because, let’s face it, having a TV show canceled in record time almost always feels like a personal rejection.

In the world of TV-news-channel fashion, the jacketless anchor will become the new screen crawl, but only temporarily. By year’s end, it will be clear that the alarmist weatherman is the real new screen crawl.

The career of regular-guy talk host Bill O’Reilly will implode on the air when he launches into a diatribe against a junior producer, “the kind of rube who doesn’t know the difference between a latte and a *$&# cappuccino.”

A consortium of the nation’s largest media companies will hold a news conference to announce that it is true: Pretty much everything wrong in American society is, in fact, the media’s fault.

At the same news conference, they will confess that the goal of all this merging and acquiring has been to see the term “media” eliminated from the discourse. Soon enough, the spokesman will say, it’ll just be “the medium.” Then he will chuckle maniacally.

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Steve Johnson writes about media for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Co. newspaper.