But What Are You Going To Do About It

Forget who it was (it might have been an anonyous telling), but someone in the Obama administration described how when Mitch decided he wouldn't give a hearing to anyone to replace Scalia, reporters basically treated it as a shrewd and funny move, and their only angle was, "what are you going to do about it?"

I'm not even entirely unsympathetic to the perspective of the reporters. Like anything else they should put such a development in context, making clear how this was or wasn't "normal" and not just doing a "one side says, the other side says." This of course did not always happen! That's a big failure of journalism, if we define journalism as "telling readers important things they need to know to understand what's going on" and not "performing a bizarre ritual which pretends to do that but doesn't."

But still, well, what are you going to do about it?