Paul Waldman: “News organizations devote resources and time to the campaign, and the reporters following candidates around have to find different things to report every day. It’s not easy to do when a campaign can be numbingly repetitive; it takes a skilled journalist to listen to a candidate give the same speech she gave yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and somehow manage to write something new about it.
”“But conflict is always new, especially when there hasn’t been that much of it in a campaign characterized by the reluctance of Trump’s Republican opponents to go after him in anything but the gentlest of terms. In addition, reporters are always drawn to intraparty conflict, which they find inherently more interesting than conflict between parties. Battles within a family can be more compelling than the dog-bites-man of sniping across partisan lines. As a bonus, when Haley attacks Trump in a speech, there will be video that can be shown on TV and ‘sound’ for the radio.”