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Does everyone know what the Friday dump is? It started in Presidential administrations during the development of the TV age for covering politics. It was discovered that like anyone, journalists hate hanging around doing real work late on a Friday, so their most fervent hope on the White House beat is that they will "close the lid" and declare the newshole from them finished for the day. Scribes scatter, the real nefarious shit starts happening in the Oval Office, and we settle in for Bill Maher and a beer. Taking advantage of this propensity to ignore potential news on a Friday, administrations learned to release bad news they had to put out, on Friday afternoon. It was hoped that everyone would look at the large "dump" of paper on their desks and say "nope, that's a Monday story." Monday would come and it would be time for Monday's news, not Friday's. So whatever was in that dump, gets passed over or given the short shrift in the news cycle. Bad news goes out, and dies there. Needless to say, this technique has filtered down, and perhaps always existed informally anyway. But you rarely see candidates rather than incumbents do it. Maybe because Merkley has electoral experience, he knows the rules of the game already and is keen to play it. But last weekend Merkley clearly tried a Friday dump--but he also mixed in a diversionary attack on Steve Novick, as insurance to drive the cycle even farther away from his own release. {the dump and attack move by Merkley, below}
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