The danger of the news hook …

… The Millions : The Berenstain Bears and the Tyranny of Timeliness.

Timeliness can be a virtue in political writing — but taken too far, and invoked too automatically, it can be poisonous. Rosin’s gaffe is an extreme example. Given the vehemence of her opinions about the Berenstain Bears books, it’s likely that she’d been incubating them for some time. A week before Jan Berenstain’s death, or a week after, few outlets would have published those thoughts, because few of us would have read them; only in a short window of newsy opportunity were those thoughts considered worth our attention. “Good riddance” has all the callous clumsiness of a writer straining to get relevance out of the way, not because she wants to, but because she has to.