The media needs something engaging happening to have something to continue to report on. (Even if that thing is just public figures reacting to a thing.) If the

The media needs something engaging happening to have something to continue to report on. (Even if that thing is just public figures reacting to a thing.) If they lob a bombshell and see it explode, but there are no further consequences to that explosion — no “sequelae”, as the medical profession would put it — then they can’t very well continue to report on the explosion. What makes further consequences happen? Powerful people taking an interest. The media is the fourth estate, but only insofar as their actions trigger reactions in the first-through-third estates. For a news story to “continue to happen”, it needs a patron in a position of power to actually care about what was reported, and act in response, in a media-visible way. News coverage is, and always has been, a feedback loop between journalists and the public figures they cover. Which implies that if something is a “taken as a given” practice among pretty much everyone with power, then reporting on it won’t get any powerful patron riled up, and so won’t get anything done to feed back into the news cycle. Democracy continues to function, separately from all this; voters read the news, get angry, and pressure their congressman, who then pushes for change in the house, causing ripples in the bureaucracy. But none of that is able to be framed in an incendiary “continuing coverage” format, because there is no heroic narrative to democracy, only the snowball effect of small actions — so the regular news media doesn’t attach to it at all, so it seems to just drop off the face of the Earth. But it’s still happening; it’s just happening in a way you can only perceive with “I watch C-SPAN” glasses on.