Good morning. It is October 7. The summery autumn weather in New York City continues, and this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, and let's do the news. 

Sorry, that, plus a sassy swear word, is apparently what Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, said to everybody on the morning call today, which immediately got leaked to semaphore's Max Taney, whose post also reported that Weiss said she wants to "win," which requires restoring trust to CBS, this is all shaping up to go just super. Weiss's probably underrated advantage, and the thing that really got her to where she is now is that her callow reactionary prejudices and politics largely overlap with those of the people who really call the shots in the purportedly liberal news business, but those attitudinal advantages are offset by the fact that she also shares their weird insularity toward the world and the people who work for them, but without any meaningful professional or executive experience to offset it. Let's do the [CURSE WORD] news, good luck and good night.

On the front of this morning's New York Times, Weiss gets a MEDIA MEMO down below the fold, "How a New Media Upstart Shot To the Top of CBS’s Crown Jewel / Fighting ‘Wokeness’ and Drawing Social Clout and Rich Allies." It starts off reasonably strongly, describing how Weiss attained her current position "without climbing the typical journalistic career ladder and with no experience directing television coverage, she is richer in social clout than in Emmys or Pulitzers, and she's known more for wanting to rid the world of so called wokeness than for promoting journalistic traditions." All accurate. But then it spirals off into something about how she represents the power of independent media, independent on whom, though. Her startup, the Free Press, was a Substack, as the story notes, her newest allies were mostly billionaires, the venture capitalists David Sachs and Marc Andreessen and Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks, invested in her company. She attended the Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Bezos. Kim Kardashian and Peter Thiel appeared on her podcast. The story ends with remarks that she gave to the Federalist Society in 2023 in which Weiss, who is married to a woman, told the audience, "I know that there are some people in this room who don't believe that my marriage should have been legal, and that's okay, because we're all Americans who want lower taxes." Some people online are tut-tutting the Times on the grounds that that was really more of a laugh line in Weiss speech to the Federalist Society, but her follow up remarks were considerably worse. What She then said was, "I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are, and my allies are not the people who, looking at facile external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good, that the West is good, and human beings, not cultures, are created equal, and that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for." Just out there, fighting for the West, against unequal cultures

To be genuinely fair to Weiss, on the merits, she is a spectacularly stupid person whose main distinguishing feature As a writer and a pundit is an apparently sincere inability to grasp what an idea or a principle even is. So that while she was, formally, as a set of words, advocating a bigoted and essentially fascist worldview, functionally for the most part, she was just saying some words that she'd heard other people say, and that she knew the people in the room would appreciate, although presumably she also did sense that the stuff about the West and cultures is the way people talk about how much they hate Muslims, which does seem to be one of Her few deeply held personal commitments.

At the top of the front of the Times, it's hard to say what carries the most weight in the layout. The overwhelming majority of the space, but not in the right hand column, is taken up by a diptych of a portrait of a former Israeli. Hostage who was released from Gaza after 471 days and of a legless Palestinian man making his way down the steps of his house in Gaza City. The overarching headline is "TWO YEARS OF WAR." The left hand headline is "Emerging From Hamas Tunnels And Learning How to Live Again." Next to that, "Broken Bodies and Broken Lives Across a Gaza Grasping for Hope." Each story jumps to its own full page spread inside the paper. Taken literally, those equal proportions are probably not the most accurate way to capture two years of war, but it is October 7, so as a way of handling the two year anniversary of the original Hamas attack, it seems like a pretty reasonable call by the Times.

The right hand news column, on the other hand, is a nightmare of packaging. "LEGAL FEUD BOILS AS 2 STATES CLAIM TRUMP ‘INVASION’ / ILLINOIS AND OREGON / A Lawsuit Seeks to Stop Texas Guard Soldiers Bound for Chicago." The President of the United States sending troops to American cities under false pretenses and attempting to evade a judge's order while doing so is not "a legal Feud." A feud is two parties who are mutually mad at each other, and usually, for some reason that's out of proportion to the response. The lead of the story is mostly where the news was yesterday morning. "Officials in Illinois and Oregon," the Times writes, "stepped up efforts to block President Trump from deploying National Guard troops in the state's cities, denouncing the effort as an attempted invasion, even as 200 soldiers from Texas were headed to Chicago." Then there's the lawsuit by Illinois and Chicago and the order from Sunday night blocking the deployment of troops to Oregon. "The federal judge in Illinois" the Times continues "April M. Perry, declined to issue an immediate order on Monday blocking the deployment of National Guard troops in the state. Judge Perry, a Biden appointee, described herself as 'very troubled by the lack of answers' from federal lawyers to her questions about the deployment. She said she needed time to review the case and set another hearing for Thursday. A US military official said Monday morning that the first group from the Texas guard, about 200 troops, was en route to Chicago. Mr. Trump's push to use military forces in a number of major cities, most of them heavily Democratic, has left courts across the country scrambling to keep pace with deployments that some judges have already deemed unconstitutional. Mr. Trump, on Monday, threatened to invoke an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act that would grant him emergency powers to send in troops, bypassing court rulings that have blocked the deployments. He also threatened to invoke the law when demonstrators clashed with the police in Los Angeles this summer." 

Here again, is the basic problem with reporting on Donald Trump and his activities, in a strict news writing and prioritization story, the president threatening to use the insurrection act to get around the court cases would probably be the lead of the story, except no one knows, or can know at this point, whether he's just pushing those words out of his mouth because the sound of them makes him feel good.

Below the fold next to the Barry Weiss thing is the latest shutdown story. "Worried, Frazzled, Indifferent: Americans Process Shutdown." After an anecdotal opening featuring a pastor in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, who does perceive the shutdown as a big deal, and an industrial supplies buyer from Wisconsin passing through Dallas Love Field who doesn't see it as a big deal, the Times writes "during the first week of the shutdown, a split screen of reactions played out across the country. Many people said that they had yet to feel a significant impact, aside from the closing of some tourist sites, air travel has been largely uninterrupted, and many Americans have not experienced a change in their everyday lives."

The word "largely" and "largely uninterrupted" is doing a lot of work. There enough work to pick up that severed wing from the Delta plane that collided with the other Delta plane at LaGuardia last week. But also, you know, those pesky print deadlines. 

KABC TV in Los Angeles reports "there were frustrating delays and cancelations on Monday evening at Hollywood Burbank Airport and other US airports, as the government shutdown triggered a shortage of air traffic controllers. From 4:15pm to 10pm Monday, there were no air traffic controllers in the Burbank tower, and operations were instead run remotely by Southern California TRACON, an approaching departure team out of San Diego. The Southern California TRACON already remotely handles a lot of the air traffic in SoCal," the story continues, "normally, you wouldn't see much activity at Burbank Airport at night due to a voluntary curfew starting at 10pm but at 11pm on Monday, planes were still taking off at the airport due to delays and cancelations. Air traffic controllers, the story says, are government employees and are considered essential, so they have to keep working, but are doing so without pay. Because of that, there's a shortage, as many of the 11,000 air traffic controllers nationwide are calling in sick." Story goes on to say, "according to an FAA advisory, there were multiple staffing triggers in place on Monday, including delays at airports in Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis and Phoenix."

Back on the front of the Times, the final story is "In a Defining Term, the Justices Take On Trump’s Tests of Power / Long List of Emergency Orders in Favor of the President." Looking forward to a Supreme Court term in which the justices, having spent The Summer giving Donald Trump everything he wants, in mostly unexplained orders, will now be issuing actual decisions, "The President's policies," the Times writes "will have an even more central role in the term that began on Monday after the justices agreed to take three cases with broad consequences for his agenda. In November, they will hear arguments about the legality of Mr. Trump's sweeping tariffs a centerpiece of his trade strategy. In December, they will consider Mr. Trump's efforts to wrest control of independent agencies, and in January, his attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board. By the time the term ends in June, there could be others. Already, the administration has asked the court to take up a pair of cases testing the legality of the President's Executive Order ending birthright citizenship, an issue that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be an American." Yeah, it sure does, in more ways than one. 

Inside the paper, in the international section on page A12, there's a truly fantastic case of the Times headline writer's insistence on abstraction and vibes, "French Prime Minister resigns in a new sign of deepening turmoil, inset subhead, "A move jeopardizes France's ability to get a budget passed." That's not his sign of turmoil. That's just turmoil.

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 Socca-Ho. You the listeners keep us going through your paid subscriptions to indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you're able, and if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.