Bill Carter, a media analyst for CNN, covered the television industry for The New York Times for 25 years, and has written four books on TV, including "The Late Shift" and "The War for Late Night." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) The story broke in the Washington Post after 8 p.m. Thursday: The Trump administration, in its latest spasm of anti-immigrant animus, had twice in recent months considered a plan to transport detainees to sanctuary cities and essentially dump them there as a form of retaliation against Democratic political adversaries, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. By Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump confirmed that he was considering this revenge plan.

The reaction across a broad swath of the most influential news outlets in America was something close to stupefaction.

Jeffrey Toobin, chief legal analyst for CNN, appearing on Anderson Cooper's show "360," called the proposed policy "really grotesque" after describing the plan as akin to "using human beings to spread a form of pestilence around the country."

Maggie Haberman, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent (and Donald Trump savant), tweeted that she had read the Post story twice, leading to a simple reaction: "It is insane."

On Brian Williams's "11th Hour" show on MSNBC, one guest, David Jolly, the one-time Republican congressman, who has renounced fealty to that party in the age of Trump, repeatedly used the word "sociopathy" to describe the policy, and said those who had come up with it were displaying "unmitigated depravity."

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And then, at least so far, pretty much everybody has gone back to covering the arrest of Julian Assange; the blowback against the attorney general enflaming conspiracy theories about spying on the Trump campaign; the fight over the President's taxes; and, inevitably, the latest polls on the Democratic presidential race.

That is: a story that merited almost cartoon-character double-takes of astonishment, marked by extreme verbal descriptions like insanity, grotesquerie and depravity, grabbed, at least for the beginnings of one news cycle, a portion of media attention, before likely getting thrown into the wash of what has become the daily recitation of the gobsmacking news out of the nation's capital.

This story was only the most recent example of the now-consuming dilemma that afflicts all media coverage of the current White House administration: How to adequately convey any lasting sense of context amid the swirling hurricane of events transpiring not just daily, but often hourly, piling up upon each other like remnants of coastal buildings swept up in the storm surge.

By any historical standard, the proposed White House plan to try to inflict some kind of damage on districts hospitable to immigrants by busing masses of detainees to those locations and setting them loose -- like an "infestation," a favorite characterization of this White House about immigrants from Mexico and Central America -- would have unleashed a torrent of intense and sustained high-volume coverage. And viewers and readers encountering widespread analysis of a story marked by terms like insanity and sociopathy would recognize something extraordinary had happened.

Instead, the din of incessant political noise can be expected to quickly obliterate any effort to give this latest development what would, in the past, have been its proper due as a screamer of a headline. And context will fly off into the ether. Astonishment will ebb. Media heads will snap back.

And the beat goes on: Drums keep pounding rhythm to the brain; ladeda dee; ladeda dah.

Coincidentally, on Thursday, The Hollywood Reporter released its list of the 35 most powerful people in New York media, an impressive group naturally dominated by the anchors, reporters, editors and executives charged with covering the maelstrom that used to just be called "news." (A bunch of late-night stars made their way in there as well, because they too are now caught up in trying to capture a phenomenon unlike anything even comedy has seen before.) Many of these folks are empowered in their efforts by the work of dogged teams of journalists who provide them with material.

The magazine began its piece about the list by declaring, "not since Watergate has the media been more relevant" and that the names on the list had been chosen for "their influence over the frenzied conversation that drives the news now."

The media as an institution is certainly relevant. It's more than that; it's indispensable. But the degree of its influence is far less clear, precisely because of the frenzy it's trying to explain.

Forget Watergate. That was a giant squid of a story, lots of tentacles coming off a central monster. It was a threat, but a recognizable one, a comprehensible one.

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What's happening now feels more dystopian, a scattered, non-linear narrative impossible to get a consistent fix on, or to approach with traditional, rational reporting and analysis. It's more like covering an invasion, story after story after story, like the Walking Dead or the White Walkers; brainless but deadly.

And they keep coming.