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Two things are true: First, the value of a hearing was not to provide new substance, but to translate the written report into a more accessible, succinct, and compelling form. So it’s fair to evaluate the hearings by that standard.
Second, insofar as the hearings failed in that goal, metagaming it is a less useful allocation of pundit/journalist energy than continuing to attempt that translation.
More generally, this sort of metagaming about how stuff will play seems very unjournalistic in spirit. It is a definitionally highly unrepresentative news consumer passing off their own guess about the modal consumer’s reaction as a fact about the event itself.
Granted, I do it too, and a certain amount is probably unavoidable, but I worry that a bunch of news junkies preemptively deeming what THEY already knew “boring” shapes (in aggregate) the perception of folks who may not have known—or yawned absent the nudge.
It occurs to me that a sort of structural advantage of the noise machine is a willingness to keep banging on about the same false or misleading story, in the absence of meaningful new developments, long past the point where debunking has become boring to the serious press.
