Paul Krugman: When Journalists Choose to Speculate Rather Than Report

Earlier this month, Dave Weigel at Slate looked at the media's disastrous initial handling of a Congressional Budget Office report - CBOghazi, hah! - and addressed one of my pet peeves: reporting that skips right past the actual policy issues to speculation about how they will play politically. I think of this as "second-order" reporting, and it's almost always a bad thing.

I wrote about this during the 2004 presidential campaign, when I did some painful research, wading through two months of TV news transcripts.