This is the way the article on the nonstory of eric massa began in this morning's Post: I really think political journalists who've spent more than 20 minutes over the past 24 hours covering the Eric Massa story need to turn the TV off, turn the BlackBerry off, turn the Twitter off, shut everything down, go to a nice quiet room, take a deep breath, look in the mirror and ask themselves why they got into this business.
It's a wonderful experience to read someone who can make sense of priorities and not call attention to every conflict of ethics or human protocol. He needs to be rewarded.
So Kudos to Yglesias. He couldn't be more accurate.
David Brooks spoke to the same issue last month in an article I've been mulling ever since. One relevant paragraph follows: Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.
I'm not certain what Brooks means when he refers to context. But in my mind the eric massa is a classic example of context. The media can't sort real value from an irrelevant human conflict. Why must we listen or read such claptrap.
And Kudos to Brooks. He understands.