Put a fork in ‘er. Cindy Hyde-Smith is done and Scott Colom is the next senator from Mississippi, according to CNN.

I’ve been watching the results all day and I was going to do a post saying essentialy the same thing. Half a percentage point, approaching 5,000 votes. Simply too big a lead to overcome. They didn’t want to pick another protein.

There’s a para-news topic I’d like to discuss with you. It has to do with how scandals do or don’t develop, what catches fire and what peters out. We know that one of the constant themes of the last two years was that anti-bromide “nothing matters.” A mammoth scandal is uncovered. A few pieces are written about it. And then … nothing. It just falls under the waves. There is a key structural reason for this that gets far too little attention. It turns on the incentives reporters, publications and readers have to pay attention.

The standard scandal reporting progression goes something like this:

Reporters unearth scandal details. Attention shakes free more information and the momentum builds. Eventually public officials announce hearings or law enforcement agencies begin investigations. Sometimes it’s both. Those actions both validate the reality of wrongdoing and create new stories to cover. It’s both the existence and progress of these investigations and the new information they generate. There are things that criminal or legislative investigators — with warrants and subpoenas — can pry loose that reporters almost never can. Eventually you might have resignations or indictments, perhaps reforms.