Nobody knows anything. Repeat after me: Nobody knows anything. The New York Times breathlessly reports that Obama "all but reached his [VP] decision while on vacation in Hawaii." As Jack Shafer says, "The key phrase, used twice in the Times story, is 'all but,' and it provides Obama's advisers the vast wiggle room in which they can simultaneously assert that he has made up his mind and that he hasn't made up his mind. In other words, the Times has no news to report—only a higher octane of speculation it expects its readers to swallow until Obama does make his announcement." The New York Times does this because they don't know anything about who Obama's vice presidential pick will be, but they have to keep reporting the news and getting people to click on their stories. Or take this Politico article from yesterday. "On a chaotic election night in Indianapolis, when Clinton’s staff was panicking about the excruciatingly slow count of votes in Obama-friendly Lake County, Bayh seemed powerless to scare up inside information. To the amazement of several Clinton insiders, he sat in a holding room, hunched over a laptop, hitting the 'refresh' button over and over on a newspaper website’s interactive vote tracker in a state he was supposed to dominate." This, apparently, has damaged Bayh's reputation. But Bayh didnt know anything. There was nothing to know. The votes hadn't been counted. The best count was probably the real-time total he was refreshing on the screen, but because it wasn't privileged inside information, because it wasn't coming in text messages and cell calls, it made Bayh look like a nobody. All journalists experience a similar thing when they call friends and family. "Tell me what's really going on," they say, as if we have secret storehouses of truly juicy gossip that we're stocking away in order to hurt our careers. If it's in the public domain, people figure, it's gotta be behind the curve. But, in general, if something has happened and reporters or political figures know about it, it's out in the public sphere. If it hasn't happened, or the information is being hoarded by a small group of key decision makers who don't leak, then it's not out in the public sphere. The media, of course, needs people to watch and read even when things aren't going on so they've become incredibly skilled at reporting absolutely nothing in such a way that people feel like they're actually being given information. But in general, they're not. They're being given something that looks like information, and so releases the same chemicals in the brain, but doesn't actually tell you what you want to know.
