Stop the presses! St. Louis business leaders have no real opinion on Rams stadium!

Not much new this weekend in the standoff between Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and state legislators over who’ll get to decide on a St. Louis Rams stadium deal, so I know what you’re thinking: Won’t anyone think of the local business leaders?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has your back, magnates of industry. Not that you really seem to care much:

Through press representatives, corporate executives either declined to discuss the stadium plan’s specifics or did not respond to requests from the Post-Dispatch to describe in detail their support, or absence of support, for the project.

The few who were willing to speak on the issue were on either side of the spectrum: enthusiastic supporter or sharp critic.

Let’s try to picture the editorial process by which this giant ball of nothingburger ended up in a major U.S. newspaper. Either the reporter in question pitched his editor on a story on how local business leaders feel about a new stadium, or the editor assigned it to the reporter, probably figuring, Hey, these are Important People, we can get a story out of this on a slow Sunday. Problem was, hardly anybody answered. But it was too late to fill the hole in the paper with some actual news, and the article was already written, so sure, “Business execs guarded on stadium proposal” is a news story if we say it is, right?

Where it becomes really problematic, of course, is when whoever it was made the designation of who gets to be Important People. There are any number of people in St. Louis that could have been contacted for equally ambiguous opinions — “Union leaders guarded on stadium proposal,” “Schoolteachers guarded on stadium proposal,” “Women with small children standing on line at local supermarket guarded on stadium proposal” — but business leaders are considered newsworthy just because they are, even though no one elected them, they don’t get any more votes than anyone else, and their opinion doesn’t matter any extra for economic reasons. (It’s not like the local Schnucks grocery chain is going to shutter all its stores and move to California if things don’t go its way, even if its execs had a way they wanted things to go.) It’s like a weird holdover of feudalism: When there are important decisions to be made, ask the local rich guy. We’ve ostensibly had representative democracy for the last couple hundred years, but it’s taking a little while for journalism to catch up.