Earlier this week something stunning happened on the national political scene. No, not the front page New York Times story in which the top advisors for the Bernie Sanders campaign all blamed its demise on his unwillingness to listen to their advice. That’s par for the course when a losing campaign is nearly over, and the people who ran it want to make clear to any future employers that the loss wasn’t their fault. What’s remarkable is that, days later, these same people are still somehow in charge of Bernie’s campaign. Why the hell hasn’t he fired them yet?

The inaction of Bernie Sanders on this matter raises a number of questions. Candidates on the campaign trail have wall to wall schedules and every minute is taken up, so they often rely on their advisors to put things in front of them. Is it possible his advisors have kept him so isolated from the outside world that they’ve managed to make sure he hasn’t seen the New York Times article in question? Is it possible they have shown it to him, but his trademark political obliviousness has kept him from understanding why his own people were throwing him under the bus? Or perhaps Bernie knows full well that he’s been sold out by advisors who are now trying to cover their own backsides, but he figures he’s so near the end of his sinking campaign that there would be no point in bringing in new handlers at this late date.

In any case it’s difficult to imagine the tenor inside the upper echelon of the Sanders campaign at this point. Every top advisor with even a basic understanding of election math knows that he was realistically eliminated on March 15th – but does Bernie know it? Are his advisors overspending to win mathematically meaningless small states and floating absurd superdelegate-flipping fantasies as a way of convincing Bernie he still has a chance, so he’ll keep the campaign going longer and they’ll keep getting paid? Or have they done their jobs in good faith and told him it’s over, but he wants to keep it going because he doesn’t understand electoral math?

If the televison news networks would do their jobs and have their embedded reporters in the Sanders campaign tell us what’s actually going on, we wouldn’t be forced to speculate. But because the “good guy underdog Bernie still has a chance” narrative has been too good for television ratings for any network to want to give up on it, no matter how painfully fictional of a storyline it is at this point, we get no straight answers from those journalists who are in a position to know.