“The idea that Condi Rice, an African-American conservative woman could team up with a white-guy Mormon to take on an African-American, left-leaning Democrat is just too delicious for reporters to ignore,” says Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs and a former Washington bureau chief for CNN. 

So why not do it? Why shouldn’t news outlets take the opportunity to pooh-pooh the story as a way of driving clicks and ratings? Simple, Sesno says. If they don’t, someone else will. “The question in newsrooms now is “if ‘so many have seen it, heard it, read it, tweeted it, how can we ignore it?’”

The Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn puts it like this: “They know Drudge is a monster traffic-driver and that even if they ignore his tasty tidbits, their rivals won’t.” Why is it that a site which hasn’t updated its approach since 1998 can hold such pull over so many other outlets in the pivot-on-a-dime age of Twitter? (ht Anthony De Rosa)