Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

That was quite a tizzy Sen. Hillary Clinton set off the other day when she brought up, as if in passing, that “Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California” 40 years ago.

More tizzy, in all likelihood, than she intended, depending on how one parses her remarks before the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus on May 23. Since then, parsing her key paragraph has become almost an industry unto itself.

Clinton’s intent, if one puts the remark in context, was to argue that there was nothing unusual about a nomination fight persisting into June. The sentence just before her Kennedy assassination recollection was “my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?”

Wrong. The 1992 California primary was June 2, by no one’s definition “somewhere in the middle” of the month. And Bill Clinton had effectively, if not officially, wrapped up the nomination some six weeks earlier.

As political hyperbole goes, 10 days of calendrical fudgery is a minor offense. But her next sentence was, shall we say, meta-political. The politics of June 4, 1968, was that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy won the primary, with 46 percent of the vote to Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s 43 percent. (California Attorney General Thomas Lynch, representing Vice President Hubert Humphrey, got the rest.) What happened in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel after Kennedy’s victory speech was not a political event, however it may have transformed the political world.

So it was, from almost any perspective, a dumb thing to say. For our purposes, though, what she said is less important than how it become such a big story. She had, after all, said the very same thing, in almost the same words, in a March 6 interview with Time magazine. No one noticed. This time, the walls came crashing down around her, and the way it happened demonstrates some realities about political journalism today. They are not necessarily unfortunate realities; that’s a matter of opinion. For now, just consider them useful illustrations.

Those eight words did not become front-page news courtesy of the many reporters covering Clinton’s campaign. In fact, according to the account in the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire, the traveling press corps, seated in the cafe section of a Brandon, S.D., grocery store, paid little or no attention to Clinton’s evocation of Kennedy’s assassination.

In fact, the first Associated Press account of the interview did not mention the RFK remarks at all.

That could have been, reporter Matt Phillips suggested, because the reception on the computers through which the interview was “streamed” into the store wasn’t up to par, at least to the par of  “heavily wired journalists (who) found the streamed broadcast … exceedingly slow, rendering it unwatchable.”

Hence, our first reality – technology. Or maybe technology and culture. The political press corps is wired, even if wirelessly. Blackberries. Cell phones. Laptops. The reporters have it all, and they are accustomed to top-of-the-line service.

But – more technology – one didn’t have to be in that grocery store to get the stream. Apparently a New York Post reporter, back at a desk in Manhattan, tuned in. Either because the streaming to the Post had better sound quality, or because that reporter was more on the lookout for a potentially controversial snippet, the reporter quickly wrote a story that went out on the Post’s Web site.

Where Matt Drudge saw it and quickly posted it in a prominent spot in his Drudge Report, from which many a reporter and editor takes his or her cues. Many another reporter and editor finds this mysterious because Drudge has been known to post inaccuracies, especially (though not exclusively) if the content is injurious to any Democrat, and especially any Clinton. But the explanation for Drudge’s influence is a complicated matter, perhaps examined another time. For now it only matters that by putting it on his Web site, Drudge gave the Clinton statement sufficient imprimatur.

Soon enough, the Blackberries and cell phones of those reporters in the South Dakota grocery store were flashing/ringing with inquiries from the home office about this latest flap. They gathered around an apparently surprised Clinton campaign spokesman demanding comment and clarification. The feeding frenzy had begun.

That it did, Phillips wrote, “is illustrative of journalistic competition in the Internet age. The entire pack of reporters sent to watch Clinton’s every move had somehow gotten beat, and forced into following a New York Post reporter who was nowhere near the campaign, but who, apparently, had a much better Internet connection.”

But it was more than just a hot story. It became, at least to some, an outrage. Arguably a clumsy way of saying she should stay in the race because anything can happen was interpreted as an assertion that she should stay in the race because maybe someone would shoot Sen. Barack Obama. Maybe even that she hoped someone would shoot Obama.

Before the day was out, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had delivered what can only be called a screed – and a long one – asserting that Clinton had “invoked a political nightmare.” Olbermann was careful enough to note that no “rational person” could suspect that Clinton “is actually hoping for the worst of all political calamities.” In New York’s Daily News, columnist Michael Goodwin was less restrained. “We’ve seen an X-ray of a very dark soul,” he wrote. “One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way.”

They have X-ray machines that can see into souls? Someone message the health and science reporters on their Blackberries.

None of this just happened. In another example of today’s technology (everybody is wired) and campaign culture (attack! attack! attack!), the Obama campaign zipped news of Clinton’s remarks and Olbermann’s commentary to the entire national political press corps, or at least all of it for whom they had Blackberry/cell phone access.

Not that this tactic is unique to the Obama campaign. All the campaigns have been assailing reportorial electronic devices with news, information and propaganda for months. Certainly the Clinton campaign has been aggressive about putting out any tidbit that might make life more difficult for Obama, however trivial. So clogged must be the campaign reporter’s Blackberry, cell phone and mind with this effluvia that it’s difficult to see how he or she has time to think.

[Idea for editors: Assign a reporter for a week to travel the campaign trail without Blackberry (or Blackberrial equivalent) and with orders to use a cell phone only for phone calls. See what kid of stories you get.]

Two days later, the Obama camp was cooling it. Obama himself noted that in the tumult of a campaign “sometimes you get careless,” and he would “take her at her word” that she meant no offense.

Story over. Except there’s an interesting sequel, another example, and an encouraging one, of how technology and culture are changing political journalism. In an article in Politico, John F. Harris retold how this story became a big story and concluded that “the signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.”

It was an extraordinarily candid column because Harris did not merely note that he and Politico (he’s one of the bosses there) were part of the pack on the story; he described how enthusiastic he got when a colleague first noticed the news on the wire and called Harris over to his desk.

And he told us why: “As leaders of a new publication, Politico’s senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build traffic on the Web is to get links from other Web sites. The way to get links is to be first with news – sometimes big news, sometimes small – that drives that day’s conversation.

“We are unapologetic in our premium on high velocity. In this focus on links and traffic we are not different from nearly all news sites these days, not just new publications but established ones like The New York Times.”

Even though he knew, on reflection, that while Clinton’s “comment was news by any standard … it was only big news when wrested from context and set aflame by a news media more concerned with being interesting and provocative than with being relevant or serious.”

There is hope for the culture of political journalism yet. Maybe someone should suggest that the reporters throw away their Blackberries.