The Friday News Dump is political parlance for a moment in which bad news is most ideally released to the press,

so that this bad news causes as little damage as possible to the divulger of that news.

What this means in practice is that if you are part of a presidential administration that has bad news, you have to release,

something that the world is going to find out about eventually or that you're legally obligated

to tell the public about, so you have to say something to get it out of the way. The theory here

is if you release that news on Friday, around 5 p.m., chances are it'll burn hot for a moment and then burn out over the weekend before most people hear about it.

But if they do, they will have forgotten all about it by the following Monday morning.

The TV show The West Wing actually did an episode that addressed this topic

called Take Out the Trash Day. And through the character's dialogue, we find out that they don't

just unload this information at an inconvenient time for the press to sufficiently cover it,

since a lot of the journalists will be off work for the weekend,

and the majority of the public doesn't even read the news on Saturdays,

or at least not to the same degree that they engage with it on weekdays.

They don't just do that.

They also release information in clusters, so that if you have a finite amount of space,

back in the day it was inches in a newspaper,

but these days it's more likely to be the limited attention span of online consumers.

If you have a finite amount that you can present and expect to have read each day,

hitting journalists with a deluge of information all at once makes them cover each of those things more

superficially than they might have if they only had one big, important, potentially embarrassing

story to report upon. So the moniker, News Dump, is accurate, as you seldom see just one story

reported in this way. It's generally at least one embarrassing story,

...