Milking Rumors, 24/7

Reporting on or talking about nothing has never been a problem for us in the media. Showing nothing is a bit more difficult, but we’re up to it.

But now we face a rather dicey dilemma and, frankly, this one scares me. I’m speaking about the lack of new news on the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy case. We’ve given this story 24/7 attention because, well, that’s what you wanted us to do. Whenever there was a lull, we repeated what we already knew as many times and in as many different ways as we could.

We made it our lead story every half-hour on the half-hour. When there was a rumor in between, we made sure not to substantiate it lest we’d find it untrue and therefore unreportable. We demanded answers and when we didn’t get the answers, we demanded questions. Then we’d show our reporters asking those questions and not getting the answers.

We rounded up every correspondent, pundit and politico this side of Robert Novak’s comb-over. We asked them every question we could think of, then we asked them again.

We asked Chandra’s parents and we asked her parents’ lawyer. We asked her aunt and we asked her aunt’s lawyer. We asked polygraph experts and people who had once seen a polygraph expert. We asked her neighbors, her doorman, her former boyfriends, her former girlfriends. We asked gardeners and locksmiths and interns and congressmen and senators. If we could have afforded Monica, we would have asked her. We would have asked Dan Rather, but the chump wasn’t talking.

Now we hear that there is a 50-50 chance that Chandra will ever be found. We can keep that news item recycling for two or three weeks, but what then?

It’s up to you. Please get out there, connect with someone famous and do something. Anything. Just be sure it’s something that can keep us going even when we don’t have anything to go on.