Same Headline, Different Day
How the media turns a drip of news into a 24-hour flood of hot takes.
A press release was issued on Tuesday. By Tuesday evening, twenty-three networks were reporting on the press release. By Wednesday morning, they were reporting on their own reporting. By Thursday, they were reporting on the public's reaction to their reporting on their reporting.
This is what modern journalism now calls a 'developing story'. Nothing has developed. The story is the coverage. The coverage is the story.
“We're going to bring you every angle of this,” an anchor promised, meaning: we will rotate three anchors through the same two sentences until Friday.
Newspapers, not to be outdone, published thinkpieces. The thinkpieces asked whether we were spending too much time on the story. They were 3,000 words long. They were, of course, part of the story.
Somewhere, an editor whispered “content is content” and closed a laptop with the peaceful smile of a man who has stopped caring.
