Everyone is a magician these days.

One hand distracts, while the other does the work, right? Perhaps. Lines of thought that run roughly, 'X is just a distraction from Y', are interesting.

The person making the claim presumably has followed both X and Y without losing focus, without which it would be harder to convincingly dismiss X.

Y is often a complex series of roughly related items, which itself presumes one can keep track of multiple threads without being distracted.

And, while this is perhaps a fair criticism of cable news (which does tend to obsess over one story per 'cycle'), actual newspapers, news-sites, and TV and radio programs typically cover more than one story in any given iteration.

Yet this odd meme persists. Every day, I see different people saying this, that, or the other thing is merely a distraction from some set of other stuff. Pretty regularly, one person's distraction is another person's story-They-are-trying-to-distract-You-from. If we're not all magicians, fooling eachother with elaborate gestures, then we have become that guy who sits in the crowd during the show claiming, "I know how that's done."

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