First Draft

Adrastos pointed this out to me last week and I love every word of it: 

What has happened to media revenues in general has happened worst, fastest, and hardest to local publications, newspapers most of all.

This is part of the reason Deb Fallows and I have been reporting on local-journalism innovations (and successes) we’ve seen, such as the Report for America initiative I mentioned in June, and the business model behind the last family-owned daily in Mississippi, The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus (and, long before that, the former alt-weekly that has become a leading statewide news source in Vermont, Seven Days, of Burlington).

There’s a few key points here. First, don’t ever give up ownership or control to some outside conglomerate chain bullshit:

Also, like The Commercial Dispatch in Mississippi, the paper’s family ownership means that it can spend its modest resources as it chooses. It is not under external-ownership pressure to meet regular profitability targets, which has sent so many small papers into cycles of cutback and decline.

Yup. It’s not so much that being part of a chain will give you more or less money, it’s that it will give you more or less control over what constitutes enough resources to do your job. Shutting down successful profitable operations because they miss quarterly revenue targets, for example, or some other such arbitrary trash.

Quit cutting:

“I think it’s important for newspapers not to keep cutting,”Edward told me at The QT’s office. “If you keep cutting, there’s less and less reason for people to buy the paper. If you want to keep a healthy circulation, you have to make the investment in reporters and providing the news that people can’t find anywhere else.” If there is a “secret” of the paper’s success, he said, it is “that you’re providing information that people can’t find any other place.”

And cover the stuff you need to cover, not the stuff you see other people covering:

“I believe that daily newspapers struggle because they’re so often repeating what’s already been presented, either in social media or on the television news,” Edward said. “But when you have a local newspaper that is presenting news people aren’t going to find anywhere else, I think there will always be a need for that. I think that will allow local newspapers to survive very well.”

You wouldn’t think these would be genius-level insights but you know what I don’t read in here? Any customer-blaming, paradigm-shifting, content-funneling nonsense that implies that what’s working for this small paper isn’t what they should keep doing.

A.

Ross, like Brooks, always opens his enormous yawp when it’s my turn to blog and I PROTEST, ADRASTOS, HE CAN BE YOURS FROM NOW ON: 

Now a new report from the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee charts the scale of this increase — a doubling from 22.7 deaths of despair per 100,000 American in 2000 to 45.8 per 100,000 in 2017, easily eclipsing all prior 20th-century highs.

By way of comparison to climate change, this summer’s National Climate Assessment estimated that rising temperatures could cause between 4,000 and 10,000 additional heat-related deaths annually by the end of the 21st century. But had deaths of despair remained at 2000-era levels, approximately 70,000 fewer Americans would have died this year alone.

Okay, so clearly “despair” here is designated as “bummed-out feelings” and not “my house is underwater and the insurance won’t pay for it because it was categorized as ‘flood damage’ and I didn’t have a flood rider, and also a hurricane wiped out my hospital and I can’t get my chemo by just like walking into the 7-Eleven and the company I work for doesn’t exist anymore because the goddamn peninsula it sat on washed away last year so yes, I fucking despair.”

Ross’s column is the equivalent of that asshole who, when you mention you are undergoing treatment for depression, tells you he was once a little down because his second cousin died but then he got over it without the help of “pills.”

Let’s dig further into his toolery:

Despite the absence of a CNN marathon on the issue, it’s possible to discern several working theories of the crisis, and to imagine roughly how a “deaths of despair” debate might go:

The Technocrat (voice of Pete Buttigieg): “This is primarily a drug abuse and mental-health crisis, and the only way to solve it is with more and better drug treatment programs, more and better psychiatric care. We’ll save these lives one patient, one addict, one treatment center at a time.”

HAHAHA WHAT A LOSER NO ONE NEEDS MORE MENTAL HEALTH CARE.

The Socialist (voice of Bernie Sanders): “This is obviously an economic crisis! People are despairing because their jobs have been outsourced, their wages are stagnant, the rich have hijacked the economy. Tax the plutocrats, raise the minimum wage, give everybody health insurance, and you’ll see this trend reverse.”

I would never say money solves everything. I know lots of fucking miserable rich people who have no life coping skills. But you know, two thirds of the fights people have with their kids and each other are about money and not having those fights is some kind of solution to despair.

The Cultural Healer (voice of Marianne Williamson): “You can’t just medicate this away or solve the problem with wonkery alone. There’s a spiritual void in America, a loss of meaning and metaphysical horizon. The problem is cultural, spiritual, holistic; the solution has to be all three as well.”

She’s an anti-science crackpot who in no way will be president but she ain’t WRONG, in that people are constantly told the only meaning they can possibly find is in jobs that don’t pay them enough, family that hates them, or a punishing God who tells them they’re sinners.

We don’t validate joy and from the top of this country to the goddamn bottom we’re told all our problems are unsolvable and this column is no exception.

I have written this for the voices of Democratic candidates, but there is an equivalent for Republicans: Instead of the Technocrat, imagine the Enforcer, talking about drug interdiction and border security; instead of the Socialist, the Populist, talking about China and wage subsidies and industrial policy; instead of the Cultural Healer, the Preacher talking about the need for a religious revival while the Online Nietzschean bellows from backstage about restoring masculinity.

Well, honey, at least you know.

This conclusion fits with an earlier argument from The Washington Free Beacon’s Charles Fain Lehman that we should subdivide the “despair” problem into distinct categories: A drug crisis driven by the spread of heroin and fentanyl which requires a drug policy solution; a surge in suicides and depression and heavy drinking among middle-aged working-class whites to which economic policy might offer answers; and an increase in depression and suicide generally, and among young people especially, that has more mysterious causes (social media? secularization?) and might only yield to a psychological and spiritual response.

As advice to policymakers this disaggregation makes a lot of sense, not least because the next president is more likely to improve drug policy than to ban iPhones or usher in religious renewal.

Ban iPhones. You fucking idiot. Young people aren’t upset because they have iPhones, they’re upset because *gestures broadly at everything including the nonstop drumbeat from the pages of our august publications that they’re stupid and doomed to fail.*

Following the link Douthat puts in instead of doing research, we find that OH GOSH BIG SURPRISE the study he’s so obsessed with here is primarily concerned with the “despair deaths” of … white people:

For decades, mortality rates had been falling across the developed world. But in the paper, Case and Deaton identified something odd: Mortality among middle-aged, non-Hispanic whites actually began to rise in the late 1990s, upending the popular assumption rates would decline indefinitely.

Once again, the Times is only concerned with the problems of the suburban mommy and the white coal miner. The rest of us can get fucked.

But at the same time the simultaneity of the different self-destroying trends is a brute fact of American life. And that simultaneity does not feel like just a coincidence, just correlation without entanglement — especially when you include other indicators, collapsing birthrates and declining marriage rates and decaying social trust, that all suggest a society suffering a meaning deficit, a loss of purpose and optimism and direction, a gently dehumanizing drift.

The solution is always for white people to have more babies. Amazing.

A.

WHY:

The most important campaign news of the summer was Elizabeth Warren’s surge. Early in the year, her campaign was foundering. She was in fifth place, with a mere 6 percent support.

We gave this guy a ton of money to read the Quinnipac poll for us. Great use of what we’re being told is journalism’s scarce resources.

“An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs,” they continued. This is exactly the argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos uses to support school choice.

No, the argument Betsy uses is that we should put money into religious schools to further the Christian agenda in the U.S. and better racist whites on the backs of desperate poor people, most of them people of color.

And giving everybody a voucher is literally what public school does, only that voucher is your residency, and that’s what Dr. Professor President Warren was saying, you numpty. 

That is, if you read her entire book, and not this excerpt in the Wall Street Journal, but then we can’t expect David’s assistant to do any research when she’s busy being his wife.

Professor Warren also supported proposals to help families afford day care, but she opposed the approach that candidate Warren now advocates. Back then, she called taxpayer-funded day care a liberal “sacred cow”: “Any subsidy that benefits working parents without providing a similar benefit to single-income families pushes the stay-at-home mother and her family further down the economic ladder.”

Literally the next sentence in the book: 

“Does that mean that publicly supported day care is a bad idea? Not necessarily.”

I mean, honestly, just read one paragraph beyond what supports your (and Betsy’s) ideological point, you garden weasel.

 She opposed more government regulations on housing, because such regulations reduce the incentive to build more housing.

Pretty sure they weren’t the ones that allowed a landlord to kick you out if you were gay, but go off, Dave.

In 2016 Warren and Tyagi wrote a new introduction to their book. It’s hard to believe this introduction was written by the same people. The 2003 book is intellectually unpredictable and alive.

The 2003 book, as cherrypicked by Brooks, agrees with him, and is thus GOOD! That policy proposals can change over time or be influenced by actual reality or the results of practice is not of a concern to our August American Columnists.

This is the problem with politics in a dogmatic age. Everything conforms to rigid ideology. Independent, evidence-based thinking? That goes out the window.

Apparently.

Schmuck.

A.

Of all the horrible things I’ve seen about the Bret Stephens debacle, a real-time implosion of ego and stupidity combined with an almost pathological need to step on one’s own dick in public, by far the worst to me is this:

“I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face,” he continued. “That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part. I promise to be courteous no matter what you have to say.”

I mean, Bret is terrible for throwing this tantrum in the first place, let’s not forget that. The abuse of power, the staggering overreaction to a mild metaphoric insect joke, the Streisand effect, the subtweeting in the pages of the Times, it’s all sad. Particularly coming on the heels of the Jacob Weisman nonsense, which was exactly the same goddamn thing.

Lest we think this is unusual, a blogpal of mine once got an angry phone call, then an e-mail, from a columnist at the paper that hosted her blog. Her crime? She had dared disagree with him about architecture, and he felt the need to slap his great big Pulitzer on her desk and yell various iterations of DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM. This particular species of man is on every goddamn masthead. He thinks because he was smart once he can never be wrong ever, and his fear of losing an argument, any argument, is pathetic and sad and he gets paid six figures for it.

But for some reason what itches me about Stephens’ ongoing self-owning is the “my wife and kids” routine. Like, leave them out of this, pal. I doubt they crawled into your rattrap psyche and begged you to task them with defending you. Did you really need to throw them in front of Dr. Karpf like some kind of fucked up human shield? TELL IT TO MY WIFE AND KIDS WHY DON’T YOU? What a load.

(I don’t know about you, but the very last thing I would do is invite someone I believed had malicious intent toward me to come meet with my offspring in person. But then, my spouse and child are real people, and not extensions of the public persona I perform each week on Meet the Press.)

It’s a very White Christian Male of a Certain Class move, to invoke the sanctity of one’s homelife in order to prove you’re not a choad. Men since the days of Homer have been hauling out their virtuous helpmeets and pure-of-heart scions to escape criticism, as if the presence of sproglets precludes assdickery.

As if some of history’s greatest motherfuckers weren’t parents who cared about their children.

You would think Stephens, a professional opinion-haver, would be able to have his own opinions without pulling his family into this. Like either come at the guy on your own, or just ignore it like a grownup (or a chick on the internet) but don’t throw them in front of the bedbug-ridden bus that was heading your way. They didn’t ask to be your enemies’ exterminators.

A.

This is a familiar tune: 

This man is not the adult in the room at the former Gawker Media, just as Kendall Roy was not the adult in the room at Vaulter and Alden Global Capital executives are not the adult in the room at any of the 100 newspapers they are destroying. Sending a copied-and-pasted company handbook, issuing vague edicts about becoming sites for “enthusiasts,” and making inexplicable changes for the sake of making changes are the professional equivalent of a small boy dressing up in his father’s suit: He is role-playing, deluding himself but no one else.

The editors and writers and video producers and artists and sales reps and product managers and so on—the people who made this a successful company while also making it the best place I can imagine working—are its actual leaders, and the reason that, despite it all, these websites will continue writing things the rest of us want to read. But none of those people are the richest person here, which means they will keep succeeding despite—not because of—the man who is. He doesn’t know what they know; he doesn’t have to know. No one like him does.

It’s almost like the problem isn’t the format or the “business model” but the idiots running the things. It’s almost like you can send your news out on the internet or publish it on someone else’s platform or print it out on pulped-up dead trees but either way if you take all the money you make and give it to anything but the news you’re screwed in the end.

If you spend a bazillion dollars on real estate. If you rob the place blind. If you care more about double-digit profit margins than getting the paper on the porch or making the site good. If you refuse to pay for journalism, if you spend all your time screwing with journalists, you’re not going to be successful and there’s only so long you can get away with blaming your customers for not liking the thing you made suck on purpose.

I’m not happy that we’re finally paying attention to this shit 20 years too late to save the institutions that could have saved us. There’s a direct line between the ongoing decimation of local news and the rise of what all our thought leaders are calling “post-truth America” and everybody acted like it was just the weather, like it just happened to us. Like it wasn’t done on purpose to immense profit for the worst people in America and like the only people screaming about it 15 years ago were steadily ignored until the pattern repeated itself online.

And lest anyone think I’m letting my own generation of newspaper journos off the hook for missing the real story about their own demise, far, far too many of us took management’s subtle encouragement to hate the internet and Kids Today and journos younger than we were for destroying the industry that management was gleefully skullfucking in the boardroom while we fought amongst ourselves.

Far too many of us spent our days grumbling about younger reporters just out of college “taking” jobs from veterans, as if that 23-year-old Mizzou grad is the one who refused to give Howie a decent raise or offered Cheryl a buyout after her health insurance got too pricey.

Meanwhile, they blew all their money on sex offenders and rebranding. 

It shouldn’t have taken another generation of journalists having their careers destroyed for us to finally notice it wasn’t the Kids or the Internet or the “digital paradigm” or the union distribution drivers who were the problem with news. It was always the people running the thing being total idiots because failure is just as profitable for them as success and has zero consequences.

They could fuck up a baked potato and we gave them the keys to half of Idaho after they told us that famine in Ireland was just some kind of fluke.

A.

What a load, but then this is how it always works: 

It’s that sort of flawed logic that drives the podcast community up a wall. To whatever degree this medium ever enjoyed a meritocracy, increased monetization strips it away by default and by design. O’Brien was offered seven figures on the assumption that he’d produce a strong podcast—a correct assumption, but in sharp contrast with even the heaviest hitters of the medium, who must always work twice as hard to prove what they’ve done for us lately.

I remember when Politico launched, and everyone acted like these two plucky boys from nowhere were going to pool their milk money and start them up a gol-darn blog! They were going to make a news “site” on the “internets” and it would report on politics, which was something no one had ever heard of in the year of our Lord Jesus Tits 2007.

That there were thousands of political blogs online by then didn’t stop everyone from being like POLITICO INVENTED A BLOG and I’m not surprised to see the same dynamic at work with podcasting, which underpaid/volunteer workers have been doing for free for years only to see money and promotion lavished upon someone who doesn’t need either. Conan seems fine and people really seem to like podcasts and whatever, honestly, but acting like a successful rich person is some kind of self-made man with a microphone in his basement talkin’ hard is not helpful to the media conversation right now.

This isn’t how stuff gets done. This is why everyone’s mad all the time. Because the idea was you work hard and build something and you get rewarded for it, and instead you work had and build something and then somebody who already has a squillion dollars comes along and does the same thing and everyone is like GET A LOAD OF EINSTEIN OVER HERE WITH THE PODCAST, no one ever thought of one of those before.

A.

This corn dog has more relevant insights about American politics than Mark Halperin and it has never masturbated in front of anyone.

God damn it, do you know how many people are begging online for money to pay for their cancer treatment, all of whom have more to say in America right now than this fucking filth pig?

Mark Halperin has a book deal, for which he interviewed more than 75 top Democratic strategists: https://t.co/wrh7AsJOzf pic.twitter.com/LpQHpDTDD0

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) August 18, 2019

Let’s review exactly what Mark Halperin did:

The new accusations from the four women include that Halperin masturbated in front of an ABC News employee in his office and that he violently threw another woman against a restaurant window before attempting to kiss her, and that after she rebuffed him he called her and told her she would never work in politics or media. The alleged incidents occurred while Halperin was in a position of significant authority at ABC News, while the women were young and had little power.

And this is the stunning insight that justified this kind of TRULY HORRENDOUS crap being summarily dismissed:

News coverage generally does not make it clear if time is on the side of the  Force of the Hong Kong rebels or on the side of the Beijing Empire’s Death Star.  If the choice is to bet on freedom or propaganda, an American president might choose the latter, but history always wagers on the former in the end.

What a fucking idiot. That’s from MARK HALPERIN’S WIDE WORLD OF NEWS, for which ABC should sue the living shit out of him for copyright infringement and also FUCK this guy. Not only is he a pervert and an abuser, he’s also goddamn bad at his job. His “take” is that it could go one way for Hong Kong, or it could go another way! Nobody knows! Pay me!

Like how do we justify assigning any kind of value to this?

Nothing is propping up Biden’s frontrunning horserace number as much as his electability lead. If the latter disappears, the former is deeply endangered.

If Biden can’t get elected, he can’t get elected! Wow, were we suffering without that. Wherever would we find a racist-curious middle-of-the-road’s-dick-sucking sentient tote bag without THIS man? How could we possibly have had a whole ass election and an entire politics without his incisive commentary?

This goddamn remora. He’s not even attached to a shark. He’s attached to other remoras, with this. Like Bob “Don’t Call Out the Swiftboaters” Shrum, and a bunch of other people who’ve been wrong about everything and could be replaced with your average left Twitter account for half the money and twice the electoral votes.

We have a man who shouldn’t get to do anything in journalism anymore writing a book about people who shouldn’t have anything to say in politics and people will book him on their shows and for their “ideas festivals” and it’s no wonder people are mad and disaffected all the time, that this is what gets you a parade.

A.

It’s news YOU CAN USE!

It’s not that journalists don’t know how to provide actionable information; we do this all the time, just only for certain people. In the era of paid-referral links, many of our most respected news sources have put journalists to work on a kind of information-concierge service for the consumer class, offering detailed recommendations for the best standing desks and smart-home appliances, but little health advice for those who work all day on their feet or juggle bills to make rent. We hear a chorus of hot tips for “smarter living,” and near silence on how to survive in America. The economist James Hamilton put it well in a panel at ONA last year, “There is no Wirecutter for the poor.”

City Bureau is doing massively important work in Chicago and I love everything about how they do it. For the longest time the bigger papers covered certain neighborhoods and didn’t cover others and everybody pretended it was the fault of people in those neighborhoods for not buying the paper, ie we’ll cover it when we have readers there. Well, the internet did do one thing to journalism which was to upend the idea that you only want to read about shit going on literally next door and then only if it winds up on your porch.

Advertisers and city leader-types always resented the shit out of stories that made “their” town look bad, like no, our schools are perfect and our housing stock is of the highest caliber and so what if people are dying from preventable environmental causes or shooting each other, you’re making us look bad! And so the coverage shifts, bit by bit, to the people the EIC’s wife knows from her book club, and the things they care about.

Consumer journalism has its place but as people have less and less money to consume, it’s incumbent upon journalism to, you know, at least know how to do something else. I can’t tell you how many local TV newscasts have this “news YOU can use” or “fighting for YOU” segment where they deal with a customer service department for someone.

It’s fine, I guess, I’m glad Mrs. Peters got her cable bill sorted out but can we please also cover a system that persistently outsources every single aspect of service such that unless you have a large Twitter following or a TV station at your back you can’t get anyone to listen to you? We spend half our lives screaming at machines, like Alexa, dismantle late capitalism please.

Journalism should be useful, but what is useful to someone who has no money for rent in a segment about Amazon Prime Day? Or Black Friday? What is useful about one person getting their insurance company to listen to them if there are thousands who can’t be heard?

I really don’t love the implication that the only kind of news you can “use” is something that affects what you can buy. Voting information is news you can use. Crime reports are news you can use. Political and policy debates involve news you can “use” to live your life in a goddamn democracy, let’s really get crazy here. Once you accept the premise that ALL news is useful you really start to see what can be done.

Kids in cages is news you can use, to let them out.

A.

Student journalists are out here kicking fucking ass for no money at all, just because they see injustice and want it corrected, raise a glass of something age-appropriate:

Ms. Barber-Just, a journalism teacher at Amherst-Pelham Regional High School for more than 20 years, laughed and told her class that it was really hard to do an investigation of that scale while in high school. You don’t have a big Spotlight team, she said.

By the next week, a student in her class had begun his own one-month investigation into the school district’s use of prison labor to reupholster all the seats in Amherst-Pelham Regional’s auditorium.

The student, Spencer Cliche, who turned 18 on Friday, published a 3,000-word exposé in the school newspaper this month that shocked the community. Within 24 hours, Ms. Barber-Just saw that nearly a thousand people had clicked on the article. The superintendent issued a statement to school staff members promising never to contract with the prison again.

At a time of unprecedented whining and bitching in journalism we need to remember there are people out here just straight up doing the job because the job is in front of them and they can.

Competition for this kid’s work should be as fierce as if he could throw a football, just saying. Sign him, papers.

A.

Something I think our August Media Betters, those who protect us against Democracy Dying in Darkness every day, have utterly forgotten:

Put this on a massive sign overlooking the White House. And outside of every white Evangelical church in America. https://t.co/RhebNi5I3i

— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) June 24, 2019

I’ll go one better.

Run it on every news show. Every night. Every single night until this ends.

Every day on the 24-hour networks. All day long.

That’s all it is. Stories from the camps. Stories about the camps. People talking about what to do about the camps and I don’t mean inviting one Democratic senator who’s going to talk about civility and one racist fascist fuckface who’s going to yell about Obamaphones and illegal aliens. I mean activists, attorneys, people trying to get to their families.

Wall to wall coverage. The kind you get when a pretty white girl is on trial for killing her baby.

The kind you get when a president wants to lie about a war.

The kind you get when, as I said over the weekend, one baby falls down one well.

Every single newscast in America could do this TOMORROW. They could do this TONIGHT. They could throw everybody in a room together and say this is what we’re about. This is what we’re doing. This is all we’re doing and it’s all we’re doing until it ends.

And 20 years from now we would remember those journalists as heroes. We would laud them in our history books. We would mention their names in the same breath as our liberal elders mention Murrow, as they mention Cronkite. Not that it’s the most important thing ever, in comparison to closing the FUCKING BABY CONCENTRATION CAMPS, but if vain and lazy reporters need a reason, here’s one: It’s what God put you on this earth to do.

But the advertisers, the bosses, the politicians, the accusations of bias, the OTHER STORIES, dear Liza, the other stories that need telling too. The panel you’ve already set up for Sunday that will change so little about the world, the favors you owe people and the fear of being fired. The mortgage you have to pay, the kids’ college fund, the money the money the money the money. The learned helplessness we’ve all watched journalism practice over the past 35 years.

The routine: get both sides, shrug your shoulders, and go home.

The pretense to powerlessness is humiliating to watch on a good day, but today? Today is unlike any other day. It’s rarely so very clear what needs to be done. You should be thanking heaven for the camera in your hands.

It can’t be done? There’s too much calcified inaction, there’s too much resistance? It’s impossible? You cowardly fucks. You all went to college for one hundred and fifty-seven years. You all studied this shit and you all, I guarantee, puffed your asses up about how fucking hard you were gonna tell truth to power.

Here’s truth: We are running concentration camps and people are dying.

Here’s power. It’s in your goddamn hands. Seize the mics and barricade the doors.

I’m going to take you all on a trip down memory lane. It’s called America Held Hostage, and you may have heard about it on a little program run by an obscure journalist named TED GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING KOPPEL:

I was chief diplomatic correspondent. I’d be on the evening news and then I’d be on the late night news at 11:30. And these programs were infamously called “America Held Hostage: Day 5,” Day 7, Day 20, etc. And then one day I remember being on the phone with Roone saying, “You know, there’s nothing going on today. I mean, we really shouldn’t even be doing a special tonight.” And Roone said, “Tell me what a mullah is. Tell me what an ayatollah is. Explain the difference between Shia and Sunni.”

GQ: So he told you to be creative.

TK: He told us to be creative—Tell us stuff about the shah, tell us stuff about the religions, tell us stuff about the political make-up in Iran. All perfectly legitimate things to discuss, but not the kind of thing that you would normally put on a network at 11:30 at night. But such was the level of interest in the fate of the hostages that people were really tuning in.

Now, you can make all kinds of criticisms about the way this program treated a Democratic president and the way it fueled Reagan’s election (Koppel makes some of those himself in the interview) but what happened was a news program decided to make something THE issue of the day and they just fucking did it come hell or high water because they wanted to.

Years later, they did it again:

ABC issued a statement defending the program, which aired one day before the anniversary of President Bush’s May 1 declaration that major combat was over in Iraq.

The ABC statement noted that on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks it aired the names and pictures of the victims.

“ABC News will continue to report on all facets of the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism in a manner consistent with the standards which ABC News has set for decades,” it said.

The show, titled “The Fallen,” aired at 11:35 p.m. ET Friday, and ran until 12:09 a.m.

ABC News showed the tribute live on its Jumbotron screen in New York’s Times Square.

Imagine that, with the camps. Imagine it every day until it’s over.

Now go DO IT, dammit Jesus.

A.

In light of this nonsense, I look forward to this NYT/Washington Post/Atlantic series about people who WOULD vote for Democrats, except for all the socialism:

Inside Carol’s Cozy Corner diner in East Westville, Pennsylvania, the air was thick with bacon grease and coffee that doesn’t cost $5. There are no lattes here, no free-range chicken sausage wraps with vegannaise. You’ll get your buckwheat flapjacks and like them, hippie.

Sitting at the counter, his oil-stained hands gnarled from years of real, hard work in the mines, Joe America scoffed when asked if he’d consider voting for Elizabeth Warren.

“She’s a socialist,” he said, and his buddies next to him nodded assent. “My grandfather didn’t fight in Korea so we could have socialism in America.”  

Joe America hasn’t benefitted at all from Trump’s policies, but says he’d consider voting for the president again.

“At least he’s against infanticide,” he said, cutting into his ham steak. “Democrats want to kill babies in the hospital right after they’re born. Say what you like about Trump, at least he doesn’t want babies killed. Unlike those socialists.”

What WOULD persuade such a person to vote for a Democrat for president? For senator, representative, town council? Joe considered for a moment, then looked around the diner.

“See people like this? Hard-working people?” He gestured to his fellow patrons, all of them doubtless miners, plumbers, roofers and railroad workers since everyone knows no soft-handed office workers ever visit a diner for breakfast. “Democrats don’t understand people like this. They don’t offer them anything.”

Joe stared into the distance as a truck carrying coal from the coal-filled coal mine rumbled by. One thing is certain from this encounter in red rural country: If the Democratic Party wants to appeal to voters such as this one, they have to abandon policies perceived by low-information voters to be socialist. Or infanticidal.

I mean I just can’t wait for these takes. No one will ask people what they think socialism IS, or how they believe Chuck Schumer is sneaking into hospital rooms to personally club healthy infants, or what specific policies they could point to that would convince them he’s not.

It’ll just be a morass of “people believe what Fox News and talk radio tell them, but we’ll never use the word Fox or the word News, because we don’t want to call people sheep and we don’t have room to get into the influence of a 24-hour propaganda machine for the GOP, it’s the thing we all know but don’t talk about ever.”

Socialism and infanticide are the Fox- and talk-tested flashpoint words and everyone will go along with the charade knowing it’s a charade and then pretending that going along with the charade means fulfilling their missing to keep democracy from dying in darkness, like this sort of shit saves the world. I’m so glad we’re killing journalism and building something new.

A.