Big if True: The Next Big Thing is Speculative Journalism

This is the post-Four Seasons landscaping media ecology. Ugly, fact-free press conferences held under absurd conditions are ostensibly to be taken as something other than what they are. Reductio ad absurdum is an important mathematical idea — if one reduces an equation to say 2+2=5 or that 2+2 does not equal 4, you know it is wrong. Without a mooring in the not-absurd journalism goes entirely off the rails, becoming bad drama or a full-scale farce.