Good morning. It is September 25th. It is a stifling and rainy morning in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The typhoon Ragasa, which has killed at least 25 people on its westward march from the Philippines through Hong Kong, Taiwan, and southern mainland China, is closing in on Vietnam with weakening winds, but still carrying the threat of severe flooding. The top photo on the front of this morning's print edition of the New York Times is of a family mourning a flood victim in Guangfu, Taiwan. The story about that part of the flooding and the rest of the typhoon coverage is inside the paper on page A11. The Guangfu story is “Lake bursts unleashing a deadly flood on a Taiwan town.” The Times reports that 17 people were killed and 17 are missing after a mountain lake overflowed and spilled into the town. 

Back on page one in the lead news column, the Times turns its attention to the upcoming government shutdown deadline in a truly heinously constructed story with even worse packaging. The headline stack is “COSTS MAY SOAR FOR AMERICANS ON OBAMACARE / SUBSIDIES TO EXPIRE / Congress Is at a Partisan Impasse on Renewing Tax Credits.” What the headline calls a partisan impasse and the body of the story describes as a standoff between Democratic and Republican lawmakers could be more simply and accurately described by saying that the Republican majorities in Congress are planning to eliminate the subsidies in the appropriations bill they intend to pass. A “partisan impasse” would be if the Democrats and Republicans each had some other policy preference that they wanted to enact and were holding the subsidies hostage to pressure the other side into supporting their goal. Instead, what's going on here is that Republicans are trying to yank away the support for people's premiums under the Affordable Care Act in furtherance of their longstanding goal of undermining the act and of making health coverage more expensive and unavailable in general, so that Americans don't ever get the idea that healthcare is a basic human right, and the only thing that the Democrats can do to try to save the subsidies would be to refuse to support the spending bill and let the Republicans shut down the government. 

The Dallas ICE attack is on the left-hand side of the page. “Dallas Shooter Kills Detainee At ICE Office / Rising Fears of Attacks With Political Ties.” The lead is a classic Times combination of factual news and abstract gas. “A sniper perched on a nearby rooftop fired at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas on Wednesday morning, killing one detainee and critically injuring two others. The Department of Homeland Security said. It was the latest act of violence to raise fears that politically motivated attacks are increasing in the United States.” 

If you can report that politically motivated attacks are increasing, then report it. If you don't have the reporting to support the claim, then don't try to slip it into the piece under the guise of something that some unspecified parties are feeling afraid about. One reason the Times doesn't have the reporting to make a factual case about political violence is that the press has no idea what was actually going on in the Dallas attack.

The Times writes, “R. Joseph Rothrock, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Dallas field office, said that rounds found near the shooter were marked with messages that were ‘anti-ICE in nature.’ Kash Patel, the FBI director, posted a photo on social media showing a rifle ammunition clip with one bullet inscribed with the words ‘ANTI-ICE.’ The New York Times has not independently verified details about the writing on the ammunition. The idea that the anti-ICE message was someone writing “ANTI-ICE,” is so spectacularly dumb that it is consistent with reporting elsewhere that the person identified as the shooter, 29-year-old Joshua John, who reportedly killed himself at the scene, was more of a toxic, nihilistic edgelord. Ken Klippenstein reports that he located friends of John's and talked to them, and that their accounts paint the picture of someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally, including Trump, but who didn't engage with politics beyond that. “He preferred edgy humor, video games, and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life as well as their own friendships several years ago, they said.” 

Back on the front page of the Times, yet another headline turns a one-sided issue into a two-sided standoff. “Narrative war pits Pentagon against press. Imagine for a moment that the Defense Department's new demand for a pledge from Pentagon reporters,” the Times writes, “a commitment not to publish even unclassified but sensitive information, except what press officers approve under threat of losing their press passes, had existed during the botched evacuation of American personnel from Afghanistan four years ago. Reporters would have been under pressure to cover that withdrawal, which President Trump regularly describes as the most disastrous moment in American military history as the Pentagon would have wanted it depicted, a heroic airlift amid chaos. The reporters who revealed the drone strike during the evacuation that killed 10 civilians, contradicting the Biden administration's insistence that it was a ‘righteous strike,’ could have been in danger of losing their military press credentials.” Sure, but also, of course, so what and who cares? The Trump administration's abuses of power would have been treated by the Trump movement as an outrage if they had been done by the Biden administration. Yes, that's right. That is the basic premise of how Donald Trump uses power. Trying to put the administration's gag orders in some larger context of the history of adversarial relations between the military and the press misses the more relevant context that this is just what this administration does with everything. 

Below the jump for that story on page A15, the headline is “SEC dropped a civil complaint against a former client of its Trump-picked chairman. In 2018,” the Times writes, “Paul Atkins was paid $1,450 an hour to be an expert witness by Devin Archer's lawyers as they tried to undermine accusations that their client defrauded a Native American tribal entity and others out of $60 million. While Mr. Archer was convicted anyway, he was pardoned by President Trump in March.” You could write a story about how Republicans would feel if the same fact pattern had unfolded under Joe Biden's SEC. But why bother? The question isn't how they feel about conflicts of interest. It's how they feel about Donald Trump. 

Back on page one, the Times returns to the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump's press event on autism earlier this week. “Guidance on Tylenol worries pregnant women. Surreal Trump advice adds new stress.” Yes, people who need to manage pain in pregnancy were not happy to hear the president telling them that taking Tylenol would make their babies autistic. “In interviews with pregnant women and doctors,” the Times writes, “they described how Mr. Trump's announcement added a new wrinkle of worry. As it is, pregnant women do not need to look very far for advice and admonishment. It comes from all directions, even from strangers on the street. 

Down at the bottom of the page in the left-hand corner, the Times attempts to write Jimmy Kimmel's suspension and return into a recent history of politics and late-night comedy. “Late night's political evolution took hold long before Trump” is the headline ,contradicted immediately by the lead “Late night talk shows weren't always the tip of the spear,” technically semantically “long before Trump” as a span of time is not the same thing as “always.” It's true late night talk shows weren't “always” the “tip of the spear.” Once upon a time, the tip of the spear was a long piece of flint chipped into a triangular stone blade. Sometime after that, it was bronze. But the story is trying to operate within the horizons of the television era. “For most of its history,” the Times writes, “this distinctly American genre introduced audiences to polite Midwestern men in suits who lulled viewers to sleep with apolitical punchlines and celebrity chat. The comedians generating controversy by addressing hot button issues were standups like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or Dave Chappelle. But the joke tellers who have emerged as the highest profile critics of the second Trump administration and the ones most under attack are that supposedly endangered species, the network late night hosts. How did these establishment figures become so political?” The story goes on to say “to understand how network late night hosts became such critics of Trump, you have to take the long view. You can trace the evolution quite neatly over the career of Jimmy Kimmel, who has moved from the frat boy humor of The Man Show in the early 2000s to the unlikely face of the resistance, earnestly championing free speech and journalistic independence in his return to television Tuesday night after Disney had suspended his ABC show Jimmy Kimmel Live, under pressure from the Trump administration. The most important influence on Kimmel,” the Times writes, “has always been his childhood hero, David Letterman. ‘My Jesus,’ he once called the older star, and some of his actions now reflect the knee-jerk irreverence toward authority that Late Night with David Letterman regularly displayed in the 1980s. But searching for Kimmel's road to Damascus moment will only get you so far. The political shift of late night television and Kimmel began with the influential program that followed The Man Show on Comedy Central, the daily show with Jon Stewart. Of course, there had been popular political comedy on Late Night before Stewart.” Free piece of editing advice here, anytime you're going to use the words, “of course,” don't. Here what it means is “there is a large and obvious hole in the argument.” Anyway, there “had been popular political comedy on late night before Stuart. From the Times Continues contentious episodes of the Dick Cavett show in the 1960s and 70s to Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect in the 90s, which aired on ABC and was replaced by, wait for it, Jimmy Kimmel Live. But Stuart's success gave birth to an entirely new genre of righteous comedy. He didn't just comment on the news. For many, he provided a substitute news source.” Well, John Stewart sat down in the anchor chair of The Daily Show in 1999, which was 24 years after the first weekend update segment on Saturday Night Live, which coincided with the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. 1999 was also six years into the administration of Bill Clinton, who goes unmentioned in the story, despite being the central figure in late night monologues of his era. 1999 was also four years before the debut of Chappelle's show, even though you may recall Chappelle from the lead of the piece as an example of someone who was doing political humor before late-night talk hosts supposedly got into the game. But none of that is the most daft chronology in the piece. That comes where the piece argues, “the main reason that Stewart changed late night is simply that his show drew audiences, especially young ones. You started to see hosts like Letterman become more outspoken in their politics, not just battling with a vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, but also regularly inviting an unfiltered businessman named Donald Trump to spout off about the news of the day.” While we're time traveling, let's go back to the New York Times of August 15th, 2017. 

Under the byline of Jason Zinoman, the same person who wrote today's story, there's the following paragraph. “The first time Mr. Trump appeared as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman, the NBC precursor to Late Show on CBS, was in 1987, the year he published The Art of the Deal. Mr. Trump bemoaned our so-called allies ripping us off by not paying enough for our military support. And there was his now familiar gloom and doom expressed in the harsh hyperbole of a guy complaining to his taxi driver. In a broadside against the mayor at the time, Ed Koch, he called not only the subways and schools in New York a disgrace, but also the zoos.” John Stewart's influence was so powerful, it somehow rippled backward in time a dozen years to inspire David Letterman to bring on Donald Trump, to catch up with a show whose future host was at the time in the first year of trying to start his stand-up career. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.