Judge Sotomayor will be confirmed. Everyone knows that. First, she will have to appear before the flaccid minds of the Senate judiciary committee. Those minds will huff and puff and pontificate for and against. They'll ask questions that they know a jurist can't answer because to answer now would mean recusing oneself later. Then she'll be confirmed just as everyone already knows she will.

So why all the Sotomayor-related stories? Is this a slow news cycle? 

No. North Korea is shooting and exploding. After 8 years of 6 party diplomacy, we've achieved nothing. What are we going to do next? Where's that story? Someone is trying to make sense of and peace in the Middle East for the first time since 1996. Where's that story?  Buried beneath the Sotomayor mutterings. The list goes on. Healthcare. Climate. An economy that is still beeding 600 thousand jobs a month. Where are those stories? 

How do we get reporters to dig down and get the news? Instead of just amplifying the tired views of Newt, Rush and all the other Washington puffermen, right and left, who haven't had an original or important thing to say in decades. 

The late Charles McCabe, columnist for the San Chronicle, once offered that being a PR person was the easiest job in the world. Why? Because reporters, editors and publishers were too lazy or timid to go find the news. And if you gave them the news, it saved them a lot of work. 

It occurs to me that the "new media" is replacing the "old media" with the same kind of lazy, gutless effort that typifies the old media. Instead of digging and making news, you wait for the news to happen, then report what everyone has to say about it until you're reporting what each other says about it. TPM said that Politico said that Koz said that Raw Story said that Huff said. It's what I call "A Circle Link." The result: all Sotomayor all the time.