Weak opinions and damp squib reporting

The same phenomenon, twice in one week.  I have mentioned that with the overturn of Roe this past Friday, the mainstream media was amplifying pro-choice advocates' lamentations and threats.  The airwaves and the screens were full of predictions of protests and riots for the weekend.  Which never transpired.  

The lamenters continued to lament but in terms of a mass protests of people demonstrating their ire?  Not so much.

On Tuesday something similar happened with the House January 6th Committee.  I have, after the first few days of the Committee, resolutely not followed their activities.  It quickly became more than apparent that it was merely a partisan political campaign rather than either a judicial or investigating committee.  My time is limited and valuable.  Why spend it on antics?

Nevertheless, the headlines were filled on Tuesday with revelations of "bombshell" testimony from some low level aid to Trump about his activities on January 6th.  The slavish inclusion of "bombshell" in every mainstream media report echoed peak Russia Collusion hysteria when every "news reporter" felt compelled to note that the "walls were closing in on Trump."

Double click to enlarge.

Walls which kept closing in until they disappeared because it was all a manufactured issue.  There was, and had never been, any collusion.  

Double click to enlarge.

Similar with Tuesday's bombshell.  From one transcript of the testimony, there seemed to be a pretty high probability that the testimony was . . . inaccurate?  Unbelievable?  Improbable?

None-the-less, it was an exercise in self-discipline not to go over and read the articles and find out what all the furor was about.  The conviction that it is all a manufactured partisan performance with little epistemic value is one thing.  Ignoring all the titillating headlines and promises of momentous revelation was another.

The value of self-discipline won out and the pay out seems material.  I was expecting some major headlines Wednesday morning as in-depth reporting explored the new revelations.  There were indeed more hysterical opinion pieces in the mainstream media and some debunking pieces in the right-leaning media, but no in depth reporting.

I am not seeing anything this morning either, Thursday morning.  Headlines screaming of revelations but no actual reporting.  

Seems like one more bombshell that was actually just another damp squib.

From Helen, lines 1617-1618, in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides II: Helen. Hecuba. Andromache. The Trojan women. Ion. Rhesus. The suppliant women by David Grene, Richmond Alexander Lattimore (eds.), Modern Library, 1963, p. 73

Man's most valuable trait

is a judicious sense of what not to believe.