The Daley Show With Rahm Emanuel: The Mediagasm (VIDEO)

The Daley Show With Rahm Emanuel: The Mediagasm (VIDEO)

When Richard M. Daley announced that he will not be seeking reelection as mayor of Chicago, the reaction of your cable teevee news heads was as swift as it was predictable.

Right away, someone remembered that time that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once said he'd be interested in running for mayor, should Daley step down. So everyone began exclaiming that news aloud, as often as possible. "LOOK AT YOU!" their colleagues exclaimed, "YOU HAVE MADE A CONNECTION." "Yes," they replied, "We truly are special little pretty ponies of the news business!" Then some producer said, "We should definitely shoehorn this into our predetermined campaign narrative!" And lo, everyone began yapping about how there was a "White House shake-up" coming! And that being Chief of Staff is a really, really hard and awful job! Somewhere, out in Chicago maybe, were one or two other people who might want to run for mayor, too, but never mind them!

Of course, the only two reported facts on hand were 1) that Daley was stepping down and 2) that Emanuel had, at one point, talked about running for mayor of Chicago. But now that the media's blowout preventer had failed and hot gas was rushing every which way, it was time to use their limited bandwidth to pepper David Axelrod with questions as to who would be the next chief of staff. Would it be Valerie Jarrett, maybe? Obviously, everyone should have had entirely realistic expectations that Axelrod would have been ready to answer that question that very minute!

"AAHHHHHH," said the media, adding, "LOUD NOISES!!" The Huffington Post's Ben Craw filed this report:

WATCH:

[Video produced by Ben Craw. With assistance from Jeremy Binckes.]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

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