This is always annoying to me, and I probably see it more than my fair share being such a night owl. The media pre-writing a story. Setting aside the liberal media busting for a minute, this is just more of a lazy and/or weird media thing. The schedules are so set in Washington that the media can often write the story before it comes out. Like this one from the AP, via Yahoo! I didn't think anything of it when I read the headline: Senate Hearings to Begin for Samuel Alito, because that's accurate.

I started to read the article and got just a handful of paragraphs in and found this:

After receiving some last-minute encouragement from Bush at a White House breakfast Monday, Alito was scheduled to head to Capitol Hill for the start of nomination hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ten-minute opening statements by the panel's 18 members were likely to consume the session, with direct questioning of Alito beginning Tuesday and expected to last at least two days.

Wow! I was shocked. It was 4:30 am here (CT), meaning that Alito and the President had already wrapped up breakfast and the hearings were about to begin at 5:30 am ET?! Boy, perhaps I've been wrong in saying that lawmakers haven't been doing anything but flapping their gums for the cameras in recent years, if they're truly getting up, eatting breakfast, and heading off to important business by 5:30 am.

Double wow! If I wasn't shocked enough, I scrolled up and found the time the article was posted. You ready for this? 2:37 am ET!!!. I guess they wanted to make the early bird special (Randy makes "ba dum tsss" rimshot drum noise for intentionally cheesey joke). I got the image for you, as I imagine the link won't work for long:

Sarcasm and joking aside, back to the point... Why do these lazy journalists put these stories out on the wires prematurely? Again, I don't think this is at all my usual busting on the liberal media... but just on the laziness, or whatever it is that causes them to do this. Writing stories about things that haven't happened yet, and using the words "was" and "were" about the events seems just a tad irresponsible, no?

Via a Yahoo! News search, these others had picked it up off the wires too:

Remember it was about 5:30 am ET when I searched this, and check out the times when the story was posted to these sites... Again, WOW! Bush and Alito must be wiped before the afternoon's first Seinfeld rerun comes on.

(as always, click images for full size)

By the way, I think I forgot to mention in earlier posts, The Political Teen has great video exposing Schumer's hypocrisy, as it pertains his feelings on the ABA rating weighing on SCOTUS nominees.