Where else to start but with this utter nontroversy?

The saga of the straight croissant is a nontroversy.

The complicating problem, as I mention in the column, is that a nontroversy usually has to have a grain of news value in it to be successfully trumped up into news.

And in my column in the print TIME magazine this week (subscription required, sorry), I look at the political-news genre of the campaign nontroversy, and how these stories are injected and inflated into national headlines.

But the nontroversy gave it the opportunity to get free cred with its base by getting in a fight with the media-always a no-lose, no-cost proposition-while cutting back on the primary debates that that same base relied on in 2012 to get traction for insurgent candidates.