Why newspapers trade in non-scandals

It's only off topic if you never take any headline seriously. John Podoretz posting on a Commentary blog:

The honest thing to do in these circumstances [when the facts aren't adding up to the assignment] is to kill the piece because you didn’t get the goods. That’s the problem with investigative journalism — often, the scandal is too confusing to be described in an exciting way, or it isn’t a scandal at all. But newspapers never kill the piece, because they spent too much money, too much time, and had too much hope to say, “You know what? This just didn’t pan out.”