I was at a panel on blogs and the media today and ended up in the argument over whether we're going to lose our awesome, objective, truth-telling media. Like a good blogger/pundit type, I argued that we don't really have an awesome, objective, truth-telling media, and that the accumulation of protocols and procedures meant to protect reporters from criticism actually makes it hard to figure out what's going on in a lot of news stories. Along those lines, I've read a bunch of fairly good news stories on superdelegates, but this op-ed on superdelegates and their historical role is much clearer on the subject than anything I've read in the news section. That's not because reporters are bad writers or bad people, but there's just a lot of useless stuff in news stories that hide the relevant information. Particularly useful was the tidbit that "superdelegates do not unite to block the candidate with the strongest support from voters; they have always cast a majority of their votes for the candidate who won a majority or plurality of votes in the primaries." That seems important, and given that everyone seems to agree that Clinton is going to end this with fewer delegates, I'd think the media would make more of a deal out of the weirdly ahistorical nature of a superdelegate primary.