Don’t confuse volume of news with importance

Every outlet and journalist wants to plant a flag; this story has proven to be a good way to do that. The result is that stories may be overhyped as important, just as happened with the Clinton e-mails and the WikiLeaks revelations. That builds a sense of growing scandal when what’s actually happening is the picture is being fleshed out. When you overlay that with an audience looking for a growing scandal — either from Clinton before the election or Trump after — that effect is magnified. And media outlets are rewarded for hyping things more than they ought to.

Again, none of this is to argue that there weren’t serious revelations uncovered and reported both before and after Election Day. It is, instead, to argue for more caution in evaluating the importance of a story you see on the Internet. Which, at this point, is admittedly a bit like arguing that we ought to close the doors of barns built in 1832 so that long-dead farmers don’t lose their long-dead horses.