At Salon, David Sirota noticed 15,000 journalists coming of nowhere to cover the Republican National Convention, which is not difficult journalism, but only a big fat staged PR orgy:

More and more media markets in America have become news deserts — places where city council meetings go uncovered, corruption scandals goes unnoticed and huge social ills go unmentioned. Typically, this is explained as a crisis of journalism — more specifically, a crisis of journalism resources. According to media executives’ talking points, news organizations are losing audience share, which means advertisers won’t pay as much for ads, which consequently reduces the revenues that fund real reporting.

Rooted in a self-reinforcing cycle, this tautology seems to make perfect sense. The “Dickensian aspect” of real news that affects real people’s lives simply can’t be covered because news outlets just don’t have the resources! There’s just one minor problem with this fable: It can’t be true when the same allegedly cash-strapped media is deploying 15,000 journalists to the non-news events known as the Republican and Democratic conventions.