In media there’s always been a handy fallback. If a summer blockbuster flops or a hyped series fails, then there’s always the reassurance that, hell, media is crap shoot anyway. As the saying goes, “Nobody knows anything.” We see it regularly in the press – and so often in Variety that attribution isn’t even required.

“Nobody knows anything,” William Goldman originally wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.”

Case in point: every studio turned down “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “Why did Paramount say yes?” writes Goldman. “Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything . . . [N]obody, nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

Do you really buy it? Well, the media decision-makers have certainly made some monster mistakes:

• “[T]hey felt sorry for me more than anything else. There were a lot of condolences,” said George Lucas on professional feedback before the release of “Star Wars.”
• After frustrating years of seeking publication, a woman self-published a novel with her brother and his wife’s money. The book: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
• After test audiences panned a sit-com, network executives aired the pilot in the middle of the summer re-runs, presumably to have it behind them. The show: “Seinfeld.”

Many of the biggest success stories in media – from the Harry Potter series to “American Idol” and R.E.M. – almost never saw the light of day. Generally in media 10 percent (or less) of the product line generates 90 percent (or more) of revenue. A few scattered hits compensate for a vast quantity of also-rans. Nobody knows anything.

But one has to wonder: is it really so hard? Moviegoers present at test screenings of “Gigli” or “Ishtar” probably knew that the emperor had no clothes. Conversely, does it seem that absurd that Nirvana and “Napoleon Dynamite” took off? If you think about the actual movies, television shows, and music that did well, does it always seem like a random coincidence? From that view, “nobody knows” sounds more like an excuse for an ineffective discovery process, as opposed to a timeless truth.

The obvious answer is that if you want to know what will play in Peoria, then go out and ask them. In an age of “American Idol,” it’s hardly a new idea. But at the same time we haven’t found the right mechanism, since American Idol’s voting system hasn’t worked even for some winners of the show.

Media Predict has the answer: prediction markets like ours have a truly astonishing track record of success. On average The Iowa Electronic Markets have outperformed the AP and the Gallup polls in forecasting election outcomes. Markets have consistently predicted Oscar winners, box office results, sporting events and more. In markets, people gain money if they make correct predictions. They lose if they don’t. And the end product is a powerful expression of collective intelligence.

“But won’t that lead to mass-market trash?” we often hear. “Can the crowd possibly know?” There’s a simple answer to that, too.

Media companies have an obvious and overwhelming economic interest in distributing worthwhile products, from a sophisticated novel to a well-made comic-book movie. They just need to know what works. Our markets can tell them. So we can leave things as they are, or we can help out. To us it’s a simple choice.

Today, we only know the media we have. We only know the few hits that make it through the system. But the truth is that we’re clinging to the few survivors in a desperate process of natural selection.

And it needs to be improved. If you ask your friends to list their top-ten most treasured possessions, somewhere you’ll hear about a Dylan CD, or that Jane Austen novel, or a DVD set of “Arrested Development.” Think about how much these things mean to them. What if there were more of that – for you and for everyone? What if media were better?

In the meantime many will assure us that nobody, in the end, knows anything. In an age of YouTube, Digg, and Google, the phrase will begin to sound less like a certainty and more like an embarrassment. If nobody knows . . .  then weren’t you planning to do something about that?