The media don't cover the news. They hunt it down, beat it to death, resuscitate it, and beat it to death again. Television news programs aren't information outlets so much as guess-the-news game shows where "experts" analyze the unknown and pundits predict the unknowable. When there's nothing left to say, they enter the realm of fiction.
"What if?" is the question that drives all fiction. The writer sits down before a blank page and asks herself, "What if this happened, what if that happened?" And the Muse begins spinning yarns with the threads of imagination.
Journalism, which traditionally seeks answers to who, what, when and where, serves a different Muse. Or it used to. With the explosion of alternate media, including "citizen journalism," the lines between fiction and journalism have become perhaps irrevocably blurred.
Speculation is the new journalism. In the absence of facts, speculation may nourish curiosity, but it also distorts both perception and reality. The media can't be seen as separate from the events they cover, especially when coverage is itself a creation.
These fictionalized versions of non-events, first cousins to gossip, are not innocuous. After so much chatter, ideas are imprinted on the human psyche, opinions are formed. Guilt becomes presumptive.
And all the while, we opine about everything on the basis of nothing. As of Wednesday when the grand jury temporarily adjourned, no one knew whether indictments were forthcoming in the Plame matter, yet the television was buzzing with cheap talk, as it had been for days and weeks before.
We've never had greater access to information nor more difficulty discerning truth. Trying to glean what matters amidst the media cacophony is like panning for a nugget of gold in the Pacific.
All bodes ill for a free society in which democracy depends on a well-informed public. When journalists act like fiction writers, and media watchdogs bark at shadows - when truth and fiction are cut from the same cloth - we are in trouble.
The danger is that Americans exhausted by too much information will simply turn it off and leave the business of government to those who shout loudest.
Boo.