Hardly any business in America is less consequential than Hostess, and yet Twinkies have garnered a disproportionate share of media focus and we are about to recommit the sin of over-attention here.

Our most fervent wish for the journalism profession for a long while has been that a new generation would come along trained to think. The world is adequately stocked with journalists who can write, who are careful and accurate reporters, and yet are helpless as babies when asked to punch their way through an obvious fallacy.

Hostess has been enveloped in arguments about whether management or labor is to blame for the company's downfall. You can guess where most treatments come down. Management did not invest enough in new products or upgraded software or new trucks. Begged by these indictments is the question of whether managers stupidly refused to make profitable investments or were somehow incentivized to prefer losing money. If not, one might have to entertain the possibility that management was doing the job of management, withholding investment in a business model that would not return that investment with a profit.

Hostess workers give a hand to creative destruction. Reuters

Where wealth and livelihood are entailed, where teams act together and have time and incentive to think carefully, a good assumption is that people—management, labor—act rationally. Unfortunately, journalists who might be prepared to brave bullets in a war zone nonetheless lack simple courage to see what's in front of their eyes in a matter like the Twinkies bankruptcy. The reason is endemic: Not enough is at stake for the media itself to cause the media to prefer an uncomfortable truth when a comfortable fallacy is at hand.

Nevertheless, one of the major parties to the Twinkie bankruptcy, the bakery union, has been unstinting in explaining the company's trouble in written and spoken word to anyone who wants to listen. The Hostess brands are valuable. The Hostess bakery and packaging operations are reasonably competitive and efficient, and while some reorganization and downsizing are inevitable, these properties are still worth owning.

Hostess's problem, as the bakers point out in bankruptcy filings printed in legible English, and as Hostess management has pointed out in its own equally readable filings, is that Hostess's valuable parts are held back by Hostess's high-cost, Teamster-staffed system for moving Twinkies and other delights from production facility to store shelf.

This high-cost distribution system means the company doesn't make money on many of its existing sales. It means it can't profitably extend sales to new customers and new geographical markets that might keep Hostess factories busier than ever.

Now, as we said, a good bet is that people act rationally where their material interests are concerned. The bakers make a perfectly rational judgment, in rejecting further concessions and triggering the liquidation of Hostess, that their members would be better off if no longer wedded to Hostess's Teamster-dominated delivery network.

The Teamsters, who swallowed hard and agreed to concessions in hopes of avoiding liquidation, are telling you something too. The Teamsters are telling you, quite rationally, that nothing of value would likely remain in the Hostess distribution system in a liquidation. Look at the buyers lining up for the Hostess brands, such as Tastykake owner Flower Foods and the investment fund that owns Pabst Blue Ribbon, who slaver after an opportunity to roll Twinkies and related indulgences into their own existing delivery networks. They slaver after Hostess's distribution operations not at all.

Or turn on any business channel or any football game. Bombarding you will be ads from UPS, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service aimed not at consumers but at business managers. These ads sing jingles about "logistics." They show how over-caffeinated coffee warehouse managers can improve profits by outsourcing shipping to the professionals.

These commercials exist for a reason. Both the bakers and Teamsters judge their interests rightly. The Teamsters see little hope of survival if Hostess liquidates and the bakers see little hope of survival if it doesn't. Sadly, Hostess's outdated distribution business has all the entrepreneurial appeal these days of a tube-TV factory.

It's even possible that management is right too, though some executives may wear suits, which makes them baddies: To invest more money in Hostess as currently structured would be to throw good money after bad.

So who is to blame for the Hostess outcome? Sometimes we look around the office and see the bright, intelligent-looking faces of the next generation and we feel a surge of hope that the future will bring us a media that not only gets its facts right but can reason carefully too.