Ferguson became a sort of Woodstock for witness bearers. As politicians arrived, journalists who sometimes outnumbered the protesters often became the story themselves. They went, ostensibly, “to bear witness of this moment for our readers,” as Akilah Johnson of The Boston Globe told Poynter. And while some produced important stories — after all, producing stories is a reporter’s actual job — others tweeted and blogged and Instagrammed each other bearing witness. According to a blog post from an Al Jazeera America contributor, one journalist openly treated the spectacle as a “networking opportunity,” and a chance to finally get his photo taken with Anderson Cooper.

The whole scene typified how the line between participant and observer has blurred. Reporters can be hassled by police, videotape the episode in real-time and throw it online for anyone around the world to bear witness. A protester or police officer can make news themselves if they break from the pack and say something colorful in a Joe the Plumber sort of way. And, of course, presidential emissaries and attorneys general can steal the news with their very arrival and platitudinous declarations. “We are bearing witness to a movement,” added Juan Cartagena, who was bearing witness from an MSNBC studio in New York.

Within a few days, unsurprisingly, the rampant talk of “bearing witness” became central to the “national conversation” that the shooting in Ferguson had sparked. Bearing witness and national conversations are in fact close twins in today’s insipid talking-point wasteland. Seizing on national conversations has become its own cheap proposition for all manner of opportunists. A day after Robin Williams’s death last month, a blog post titled “Carpe Diem” appeared on the website of Edelman, the global media-relations colossus. “As we mourn the loss of Robin Williams to depression, we must recognize it as an opportunity to engage in a national conversation,” wrote Lisa Kovitz, an executive vice president at the firm. “At Edelman, we are in the business of helping our clients create or join public conversations.” (Edelman later issued an apology to “anyone offended” by the post and assured everyone they would never “capitalize on the passing of a great actor.”)

What does “bearing witness” or “starting a conversation” even mean? It is not really clear, except that they have become catchall proxies for kind of being there, kind of taking note and — in many cases — not really being able to do much of anything. Their path to pervasive cliché seemed to begin, like so much else, during the Clinton years. In 1997, Bill Clinton, an expert on mass intimacy, vowed to “lead the American people in a great and unprecedented conversation about race.” A few years later, Hillary Rodham Clinton humbly embarked on a “listening tour” of New York in advance of her first senate run. In 2007, she kicked off her presidential campaign by inviting everyone to join her in “a national conversation.”

As it turned out, it was Barack Obama whose attempts at “conversation” proved much better at engaging voters in a “national conversation.” His message of change and transparency in 2008, a contrast to the nonconversational Bush years, translated well to the Internet, which the Clintons had no feel for at the time. But that skill has backfired somewhat in the White House, where the president has developed a tendency to seem like an overtired family therapist. Obama has called repeatedly for national conversations and dialogue about various things, to a point where it has become a rhetorical crutch.“President Obama is our national conversationalist in chief,” wrote Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post, who then wondered if “it might be time for a national conversation — about national conversations.” Somewhat paradoxically, while many politicians and journalists have benefited from a summer’s worth of his preferred witness-fests and conversations, Obama appears more disengaged than ever.