DEBATES: Kilmeade opened the garbage can!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2024

A tale of two revolutions: In yesterday morning's print editions, the New York Times offered a front-page report concerning debate prep.

According to the Times report, Candidate Harris has gone all in, Candidate Trump a bit less:

Inside the Trump-Harris Debate Prep: Method Acting, Insults, Tough Questions

Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.

The former president’s preparations are more improv. They are pointedly called not “debate prep” but “policy time,” meant to refresh him on his record. Nobody is playing Ms. Harris; sometimes his aides sit at a long table opposite him and bat questions back and forth, or other times he pulls up a chair closer to them. Mr. Trump has held just a handful of sessions so far, interrupting one at his Las Vegas hotel so he and his advisers could go up to his suite to watch Ms. Harris’s convention speech.

Candidate Harris has gone all in. As for Candidate Trump, let it be said that his "handful of sessions" dates back at least as far as Thursday night, August 23.

Whatever! Tomorrow evening's event stands at the end of a long and winding societal road. That road traces back to 1960—to the sudden emergence of a new communications medium.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the American people had television sets! Thus began the winding road which has taken us to the eve of tomorrow evening's event.

In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White said that year's inaugural TV debates "confirmed a revolution in American Presidential politics." In a long and winding road of his own—attention spans may have been somewhat longer then—White described the spread of the new technology behind this revolution:

WHITE (page 279): ...Ten years earlier (in 1950) of America’s then 40,000,000 families only 11 per cent (or 4,400,000) enjoyed the pleasures of a television set. By 1960 the number of American families had grown to 44,000,000, and of these no less than 88 per cent, or 40,000,000, possessed a television set. The installation of this equipment had in some years of the previous decade partaken of the quality of stampede—and in the peak stampede years of 1954—1955—1956 no fewer than 10,000 American homes had each been installing a new television set for the first time every single day of the year. The change that came about with this stampede is almost immeasurable. 

We the people had new equipment—and White said the societal effects were substantial, even revolutionary.

Our TV sets now ruled the day. "Within a single decade the medium has exploded to a dimension in shaping the American mind that rivals that of America’s schools and churches," White wrote. He was speaking in the present tense—as the revolution occurred—and he offered this assessment:

WHITE: The blast effect of this explosion on American culture in the single decade of television’s passage from commercial experiment to social menace will remain a subject of independent study and controversy for years.

So the highly prescient author said! 

Theodore White's iconic book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962. It had been published in July 1961, after being excerpted in an edition of Life magazine whose cover photo bore this title: 

A NEW LIFE FOR IKE DOWN ON THE FARM.

By clicking here, you can peruse every page of that edition of Life—and sure enough! Two months earlier, Newton Minow, the FCC chairman, had delivered a famous speech to television executives—the famous speech in which he denounced the product they were sending into American homes as "a vast wasteland."

For the record, Minow had been appointed to his post by a new president—by President John F. Kennedy! By common understanding, Kennedy's election may have been one of the fruits of the revolution White described in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war—in another such technological revolution. Tomorrow evening's event will be taking place in the context of the "explosion on American culture" of that latest revolution—an explosion many of our traditional news orgs have gone to great lengths to ignore.

As of September 1960, television had burst on the scene and had entered American homes. As we noted in Saturday's report, Teddy White was appalled by the dumbing-down of American discourse which, or so he said, accompanied this event:

WHITE (page 291): ...[T]here certainly were real differences of philosophy and ideas between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—yet rarely in American history has there been a political campaign that discussed issues less or clarified them less.

The TV debates, in retrospect, were the greatest opportunity ever for such discussion, but it was an opportunity missed. It is difficult to blame the form of the debates for this entirely; yet the form and the compulsions of the medium must certainly have been contributory. The nature of both TV and radio is that they abhor silence and “dead time.” All TV and radio discussion programs are compelled to snap question and answer back and forth as if the contestants were adversaries in an intellectual tennis match. Although every experienced newspaperman and inquirer knows that the most thoughtful and responsive answers to any difficult question come after long pause, and that the longer the pause the more illuminating the thought that follows it, nonetheless the electronic media cannot bear to suffer a pause of more than five seconds; a pause of thirty seconds of dead time on air seems interminable. Thus, snapping their two-and-a-half-minute answers back and forth, both candidates could only react for the cameras and the people, they could not think. And, since two and a half minutes permit only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts, both candidates, whenever caught out on a limb with a thought too heavy for two-minute exploration, a thought seemingly too bold or fresh to be accepted by the conditioned American mind, hastily scuttled back toward center as soon as they had enunciated the thought. 

Theodore White was appalled by the "opportunity missed." In his view, this is what had happened:

In a bow to the very nature of "the electronic media," Candidates Kennedy and Nixon had been restricted to eight (8) minutes for their opening statements, then to a mere two and a half minutes for their answers to the questions they were asked.

White's assessment surely seems quaint today. "Two and a half minutes permit only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts," he said in his famous book. That time limit—a concession to the demands of a new electronic medium—meant that the candidates had been unable to explore their ideas on various subjects in suitable detail. 

Tomorrow night's event will run on a different road. Stating the obvious, eight-minute opening statements would be viewed as unthinkable today. There will be no such opening statements at tomorrow evening's event.

Also this:

Tomorrow night, the candidates will be given two minutes to respond to questions. But in the June 27 Biden-Trump debate, the moderators frequently reminded the candidates that they had only used a small portion of their two-minute allotments in the "answers" they had provided to the questions they had been asked.

For the record, that was now—and White's book was written back then. Rightly or wrongly, he assessed the effects of the TV revolution in this manner:

WHITE (page 292): If there was to be any forum for issues, the TV debates should have provided such a forum. Yet they did not: every conceivable problem was raised by the probing imagination of the veteran correspondents who questioned the candidates. But all problems were answered in two-minute snatches, either with certain facts or with safe convictions. Neither man could pause to indulge in the slow reflection and rumination, the slow questioning of alternatives before decision, that is the inner quality of leadership.

White was describing the effects of one new communications medium. Almost surely, he couldn't have imagined the array of new media under which our failing discourse suffers today.

Tomorrow evening's event will suffer under the effects of a much broader "revolution." Theodore White, an erudite person—indeed, an egghead—could never have imagined the effects of this revolution. 

Most likely, he couldn't have imagined the two-hour "interview" with Candidate Trump staged by Mark Levin over Labor Day weekend on the Fox News Channel. 

We discussed that "interview" all last week. Could the highly erudite Theodore White have imagined some such thing?

Sadly, it gets even worse. Almost surely, White couldn't have imagined the garbage can Brian Kilmeade opened this past Saturday night as part of his weekly primetime show on that same "news channel." 

It's as we noted yesterday. Appearing on the type of podcast we discussed in Saturday's report, the retired "TV judge" Joe Brown had recently called Kamala Harris "a piece of shit." Beyond that, he had referred to Harris as the "humping hyena." 

This is one fruit of our new revolution. Also, that made Brown the perfect guest for Kilmeade's program on Fox, where one primetime star keeps asking if Hunter Biden has started "banging" or "f*cking" first lady Jill Biden yet.

(We've documented that astonishing conduct on three separate occasions. Elsewhere, it's nothing but silence.)

Theodore White was appalled by the alleged effects of one new medium—of the invasion of the TV set. Today, we labor under the strain of "cable news" and social media, and under the strain of the several other new media whose onset preceded the onset of those new media.

Kilmeade opened the garbage can Saturday night, as he so commonly does—as he is paid to do. Preparation for tomorrow's event takes place within the context of the astonishing culture these new "revolutions" have spawned.

The New York Times won't report or discuss that new, degraded political culture. (Neither will other cable news stars.) Could White have imagined that?

Tomorrow: Candidate Kennedy arose from a nap. Over at the Fox News Channel, it was time to hear from Joe Brown.

SUNDAY: Pac-10 greatness emerges again!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2024

Brian Kilmeade's squalor: With each passing week, it's becoming even more obvious.

It's obvious why the Deep State felt they had to destroy the Pac-10. Yesterday, refugees from that mightiest conference went out and did it again. 

Last week, it was Southern Cal taking LSU down. Yesterday, it was the Golden Bears, on the road at Auburn—and it was also the Wildcats (and/or Sun Devils) of Arizona State:

Additional Pacific-10 greatness:

Cal: 21
Auburn: 14

Mississippi State: 23
Arizona State: 30

Utah also took Baylor down. But as a member of the Big 12, Baylor is only SEC-adjacent.

It's as we told you last week—the allegedly "dominant" conference just keeps losing games! Luckily, if you ignore all the games a conference has lost, that conference has won every game!

At any rate, the Deep State knew it had to act—and act the Deep State did! This gives us the chance to ponder the meaning of the word "dominant" in this particular context.

 (Full disclosure: A conference can be "very good"—it could even be "the best"—without perhaps being "dominant.")

Is the SEC a "dominant" conference? We've been asking the question for years.

That circuit has lost some games this year, but the Pac-10 goes on forever!

Brian Kilmeade's guest: We don't have the stomach for it today. We don't have the stomach to transcribe Judge Joe Brown's disgraceful performance on the Fox News Channel last night.

On a gruesome podcast of the type we mentioned yesterday, Brown recently called Kamala Harris "a piece of shit" and referred to her as the "humping hyena." That made him the perfect guest for Brian Kilmeade's Saturday evening program for Fox.

Today's question: Is there anything people like Kilmeade won't do to maintain their positions at Fox? Or is it as Cummings once said?

We'll force ourselves to transcribe this garbage-can conduct tomorrow. For today, we'll offer two points:

This is the world in which we now live. Also, the New York Times is never going to report or discuss that fact.

(Long ago, Brown graduated from UCLA. That school is in the Big 10.)

SATURDAY: It's the sheer stupidity, Stupid!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2024

As the social order turns: Believe it or not, we're going to have a debate next week!

More likely, we're going to pretend to have a debate. Or perhaps it should be stated this way:

We're going to have what poses as a debate.

We're going to have something presented as a debate—but it seems there will be only one. Back in 1960, Candidates Kennedy and Nixon held four. Initially, the Kennedy camp had suggested five.

Such as it was at the time, nationwide polling switched after those famous debates, with Candidate Kennedy taking the lead away from Candidate Nixon. By the end of the fourth debate, Gallup had Kennedy leading Nixon by three points, 49-46. 

There's no way to know if those figures were accurate. In the end, the nationwide popular vote was a virtual tie, with Kennedy at 49.72 percent, Nixon at 49.55.

In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White assessed the performances of the two candidates in their famous debates. When it came to the value of these debates as a way to educate the public, he offered a gloomy assessment, built around a complaint which seems almost quaint today.

By what rules did those debates proceed? By mutual agreement, opening statements by the candidates were eight minutes long, White noted. 

No one would tolerate that today! Grumpily, he offered this larger assessment: 

WHITE (page 291): It is much more difficult to measure the debates in terms of issues, of education of the American people to the tasks and problems before them. For there certainly were real differences of philosophy and ideas between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—yet rarely in American history has there been a political campaign that discussed issues less or clarified them less.

The TV debates, in retrospect, were the greatest opportunity ever for such discussion, but it was an opportunity missed. It is difficult to blame the form of the debates for this entirely; yet the form and the compulsions of the medium must certainly have been contributory. The nature of both TV and radio is that they abhor silence and “dead time.” All TV and radio discussion programs are compelled to snap question and answer back and forth as if the contestants were adversaries in an intellectual tennis match. Although every experienced newspaperman and inquirer knows that the most thoughtful and responsive answers to any difficult question come after long pause, and that the longer the pause the more illuminating the thought that follows it, nonetheless the electronic media cannot bear to suffer a pause of more than five seconds; a pause of thirty seconds of dead time on air seems interminable. Thus, snapping their two-and-a-half-minute answers back and forth, both candidates could only react for the cameras and the people, they could not think. And, since two and a half minutes permit only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts, both candidates, whenever caught out on a limb with a thought too heavy for two-minute exploration, a thought seemingly too bold or fresh to be accepted by the conditioned American mind, hastily scuttled back toward center as soon as they had enunciated the thought. 

Their opening statements were eight minutes long! After that, the candidates were restricted to a mere two and a half minutes in their answers to the questions they were asked to address.

This time limit "permitted only a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts," White complained. As an exploration of the day's major issues, the debates thereby turned out to be "an opportunity lost."

So said the famous journalist in his iconic book. It's safe to say that he had never seen anything like the sheer stupidity, joined to undisguised propaganda, which defines our public discourse today.

When it comes to our current White House campaign, only one summary captures the state of the culture:

It's the stupidity, Stupid!

We refer to the sheer stupidity put on display by "interviews" like the one we discussed in the course of this past week. Also, by the "interviews" described by Helen Lewis in her recent painful essay for The Atlantic.

Lewis writes from across the pond. Under current arrangements, this frees her to jettison the blinders which are widely maintained Over Here.

In her painful essay. Lewis describes the broader array of "interviews" in which one current nominee has been participating. We can't repost every word, but Lewis starts like this:

Trump’s Red-Pill Podcast Tour

One weirdness of listening to Donald Trump talk for any length of time is that, amid the syllable minestrone, he occasionally says something that is both intelligible and honest.

One such moment came during his appearance on the popular podcast hosted by the computer scientist Lex Fridman this week. “To get the word out,” Trump said, is important in politics, and television was becoming “a little bit older and maybe less significant.” The online sphere—podcasts and forums such as Spaces, on X—has usurped its importance. “I just see that these platforms are starting to dominate; they’re getting very big numbers,” Trump added.

Way back when, White complained about the way the TV debates failed to educate the public. 

Speaking with a computer scientist, Candidate Trump has now said that television itself has been losing importance—is being overtaken by the newer medium known as the podcast.

Trump said this to a computer scientist living in Texas. A bit later in her essay, Lewis describes the sheer stupidity which define the types of "interviews" in question:

...[I]n the past few months, Trump has become a fully fledged podcast bro, talking with the livestreamer Adin Ross about the prosecution of the rapper Young Thug, shooting the breeze with the YouTuber turned wrestler Logan Paul about German shepherds, and interrogating the former stand-up comedian Theo Von about cocaine. His running mate, J. D. Vance, meanwhile, sat down with the Nelk Boys, where he manspread luxuriantly between cases of their hard seltzer, Happy Dad. (Product placement is a big feature of interviews on popular bro influencers’ shows: A proprietary energy drink or iced tea, or a copy of their book, is usually floating around in the back of the shot.)

In this presidential election, both candidates are mostly avoiding set-piece interviews with traditional outlets—but only one can rely on a ready-made alternative media ecosystem. Kamala Harris finally did her first full-length sit-down last week, bringing Tim Walz along as a wingman. Instead of submitting Harris to adversarial accountability interviews, her team is wildly outspending the Trump campaign on digital ads, taking the Democrats’ message directly to voters. The Republicans have a cheaper, punkier strategy: hang out with all the boys.

“The funniest component of the Trump campaign’s media strategy so far is its commitment to dipshit outreach,” the Substacker Max Read wrote last month. The constellation of influencers with whom Trump has become enmeshed does not yet have a widely accepted name. “Manosphere” comes close, because it links together the graduates of YouTube prank channels, the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss Dana White’s sprawling empire, shitposters on Elon Musk’s X, and the male-dominated stand-up comedy scene. This is a subset of the podcast world with its own distinct political tang; it is suffused with the idea that society has become too feminized and cautious, and the antidote is spaces dedicated to energy drinks, combat sports, and saying stupid things about Hitler. Think of this as Trump’s red-pill podcast tour.

These podcasts are often self-consciously anti-intellectual, marketing themselves as the home of deliberately dumb acts, edgy jokes, and rambling conversations about UFOs and sports statistics. Their spiritual daddy is Joe Rogan, but whereas he presents himself as a disaffected liberal, the new generation is happy to back right-wing causes and candidates: The Nelk Boys danced the YMCA with Trump at a rally in 2020, and Ross has explicitly endorsed Trump for president.

In his famous book, White described a presidential campaign which was presented to the public by "forty or fifty men, all veterans of their craft, all proud of their integrity and their calling."

According to White, these men—and at the time, they probably were all men—were "the finest in the profession of American journalism." They were "men of seniority and experience, some of them men of deep scholarship and wisdom."

That was White's assessment. Today, those journalists have been replaced by the assortment of flyweights and clowns to whom Trump turns for his interview sessions.

That includes the fellow who pretended to interview Trump for two hours on the Fox News Channel last weekend.

On that same "cable news" channel, the propaganda flows smoothly all day and all night, with D-list comedians and former professional wrestlers invited on the air to pretend to analyze the events of the day. For better or worse, the jugglers and clowns have replaced the proud professional journalists, with ranking journalists at organizations like the New York Times refusing to notice, report or discuss this remarkable cultural phenomenon.

For better or worse, this is the classic revolt from below. In classic fashion, the elites who still sit at the top of the heap avert their gaze as it happens. 

Across the pond, Lewis takes notice.

It's the stupidity, Stupid! The sheer stupidity of the "shitposting" which happens on Fox, joined to the sheer stupidity of the way the finer elements agree to avert their gaze, as they once did at Versailles.

Within this context, we're going to have a debate next week. No one knows what's going to happen—but we're scheduled for only one, not the traditional three, and surely not four or five.

In her essay, Lewis describes the sheer stupidity which now defines the cultural context. We tried to do the same thing with respect to the recent imitation of journalism performed on Fox by Mark Levin, AKA The Man Who Screams.

Our high priests today are screamers and clowns. In the finer precincts of Blue America, the stars avert their gaze.

This includes the stars of MSNBC—the overpaid "beloved colleagues" in whom we who live in Blue America been told to believe.

CHALLENGED: He'd never seen a nominee like Trump!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2024

Or a journalist like Levin: As a nation, we've come a very long way, baby, from the journalistic landscape described by Theodore White.

His iconic book bears a famous title: The Making of The President 1960. Key point:

In effect, White was reporting from an earlier, vastly different nation as he described the "forty or fifty men, all veterans of their craft, all proud of their integrity and their calling," who could be seen "rocking groggily off a plane at between one and two in the morning" as they followed Candidates Kennedy and Nixon around the country during that year's campaign.

White's assessment of those campaign reporters was clear. "The men assigned to cover a Presidential campaign are, normally, the finest in the profession of American journalism," he wrote. In White's view, the journalists assigned to cover Candidates Kennedy and Nixon were "men of seniority and experience, some of them men of deep scholarship and wisdom." 

They were the brightest and the best. Even when these proud men encountered the undisguised disdain of Candidate Nixon and his staff, White offered this slightly pockmarked account of their professional attitude:

"Predominantly Democratic in orientation, the reporters who followed Nixon were, nonetheless, for the sake of their own careers, anxious to write as well, as vividly, as substantively as possible about him."

So the writer wrote. On the other hand, White also said that all the reporting from the two planes was "colored" by the divergent attitudes of those reporters toward the two candidates—and he described a type of astounding misbehavior on the Kennedy plane:

"By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps—they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers. When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr. Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier."

 The writer also wrote that! In doing so, White helped establish a certain picture—a picture which has never gone away—in which the establishment press aggressively favors the Democratic candidate. 

White's portrait helped establish that powerful storyline. That said, he had almost surely never seen a journalistic performance in the course of a White House campaign like the performance which occurred on the Fox News Channel last weekend.

As we noted yesterday, White was writing, in effect, a version of The Little Presidential Campaign in The Big Woods. There was no cable news at that time. There wasn't even a CNN, let alone a Fox News Channel or an MSNBC.

Social media didn't exist; neither did the Internet. To all intents and purposes, there was no national "talk radio" of the kind Rush Limbaugh brought in several decades later.

Walter Cronkite hadn't yet become the anchor of CBS News! Nor was there anything like a Candidate Trump, or anything like the Fox News Channel's Life, Liberty and Levin.

Last Saturday and Sunday nights, Candidate Trump's Labor Day weekend was marked by a pair of hourlong appearances on that primetime cable news program. There's no reason why the candidate shouldn't have appeared on that program, but the journalism offered there represents a major challenge to the American system—to the American way of life, imperfect as it has been.

In our view, White described astounding misconduct taking place on the Kennedy plane. He said that all the reporting from that plane was "colored by" the correspondents' attitudes toward the candidate on that plane.

Sixty-four years later, White's portrait should be sobering. But he described nothing resembling the journalistic behavior which met a statement like the one shown below—a statement made by Candidate Trump early in Saturday evening's program, starting at 8:05 p.m. Eastern.

In this passage, the candidate is midway along in the first "answer" he gave to Levin's initial "question." As he starts, he's speaking about Candidate Harris, who he has already described as "Comrade Kamala." 

As the statement shown below begins, the candidate is several minutes into his first "answer" of the night. His stream of frequently false or unfounded assertions continues along from there:

TRUMP (8/31/24): I saw today she wants to build a wall. She fought me, for years, on the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall, but she was one of the people that fought me—one of the Democrats, but one of the people. And you look at how she's changed, and it's so phony, because— 

And all of this stuff— You know, with politics, it's usually their first thought, that's where they are. And her first thought is Marxism.

She's not going to have a wall. She's going to have people—we'll have a hundred million people in this country within four years if she gets elected—a hundred million. They've already allowed twenty million in—we think. I think it's a lot higher than that.

And Mark, they come from prisons and jails—there's a slight difference. And they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they come also, as terrorists, at a level that we've never seen before. And they're pouring into the country—we have millions of people coming in, but hundreds of thousands of those people are criminals from Venezuela. 

They take them off the streets of Caracas and bring them into our country and then they announce their crime rate is way down. You know, that's what they've done—their crime rate is way down now. But they come from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and from South America. And they are destroying our country. 

Then you watch her, like at the convention, "Oh, everything is just peachy dory." But migrant crime is turning out to be a disaster. Many, many people are killed and raped and mugged and everything else—these are tough people. But they let them out of jails 

You take Venezuela. Their crime rate is down at a number they've never had before. They're taking all of their criminals and busing them into the United States of America and dropping them and saying, "If you come back, we will kill you." And then I'm supposed to sit and debate this person, and she'll say, "Oh no, it's wonderful, it's wonderful," and now she's going around saying we had the weakest border in history.

She was the border czar. She was put in charge of the border...

It was now 8:07 on the clock, but the candidate's ramble continued on from here. The second question from Levin wouldn't come until 8:11. When that "question" finally came, that question looked like this:

LEVIN: Let me follow up with you. In the book, you have some very compelling photos of the border.

[...] 

She says if this so-called "bipartisan border bill" hits her desk, she will sign it. Not a single Republican in the House supported it. Three Republicans in the Senate—it was negotiated in secret. 

She never tells us what's in the bill. "Catch and release"—you put an end to that. That's in the bill. It would be a statute.

[...]

She's hiding out from the press.  Is she a liar? Is that why she's hiding out from the press? She doesn't want to tell the American people just how radical she actually is?

The candidate's long and rambling initial answer had led to a long and rambling "follow-up question." We're showing you the end of that rambling question, where the rubber, such as it was, melted into the road.

As any sane person can plainly see, this second "question" wasn't a question at all. It was instead an overtly partisan statement. At this point, we'll make the following guess:

As of November 1960, Theodore White had never seen an example of "campaign journalism" which resembled Levin's performance last weekend in even the slightest way.

Was something "wrong" with Levin's performance on this year's Labor Day weekend? Inevitably, that's a matter of judgment. Before we address that question, let's make a quick observation about what the candidate himself had said:

In that rambling presentation, the candidate was touching on a campaign issue which does present a serious challenge to his Democratic opponent. 

For whatever reason, President Biden never attempted to explain the shambolic border policies which led to large increases in "undocumented" or "illegal" border crossings during the first three years of his term.  In our view, this was a major abdication of duty on President Biden's part.

There is, of course, no way of knowing what Vice President Harris may have thought, or may have advised, about the administration's border policies. But in the impoverished intellectual landscape of the American political discourse, it has always been assumed that vice presidents agree with the policies of the administration within which they serve.

When sitting vice presidents have run for higher office, they have routinely been saddled by that lapse in logic. In the current case, performers on the Fox News Channel have been asserting, for the past five weeks, that Candidate Harris had in fact been "the border czar"—improbably, that she had in fact been "put in charge of the border" during the Biden years.

As of last weekend, each of those familiar claims had been widely challenged—but after making those claims, Candidate Trump droned on. He had already made an array of unsupported claims about the prisons and jails of Venezuela, along with that nation's "mental institutions and insane asylums."

He had made an array of unsupported claims about the "hundreds of thousands" of criminals from Venezuela who were, in some way which went undescribed, allegedly being bused into this country by some unnamed entity, and who were then being told, by unnamed persons, "If you come back [to Venezuela], we will kill you."

In fairness, the candidate's reference to the busing of "hundreds of thousands" of such criminals was a step back from his earlier claims, in which he said that millions of criminals from Venezuela were being bused into this country by some unnamed entity or persons. 

That said, a wide array of the candidate's statements in the passage we have posted have been challenged, again and again, by reputable fact-checkers. But as the candidate made these fuzzy,  inflammatory claims, the journalist from the Fox News Channel simply sat and stared.  

The journalist asked for no clarifications. The journalist asked for no evidence in support of these widely challenged claims. 

Who was busing these hundreds of thousands of criminals into the United States? Where were these buses entering the country? Why weren't these buses being stopped?

Also, who was telling these criminals that they would be killed if they returned to their country of origin? These are blindingly obvious questions, but none of these questions were asked.

In fact, the journalist from the Fox News Channel never asked any such questions during this pair of hour-long programs. Looking back to that earlier age, we think it's fair to make this assumption:

As of November 1960, Theodore White had never seen an example of campaign journalism which resembled what happened on these Fox News Channel programs. Imperfect though they may have been, no one on those campaign planes would have dreamed of behaving in the way Levin did all through the course of last weekend's programs.

In our view, it's also fair to make this assumption:

This new kind of campaign journalism presents a challenge to this nation's most basic political and governmental systems. In our view, this kind of journalism presents a fairly obvious challenge to this nation's way of life.

There's a great deal more which could be said about what happened on last weekend's hourlong programs. For the record, we think it's also fair to make this assumption:

As of November 1960, Theodore White had never seen a presidential nominee who trafficked in false or unsupported claims in the way this candidate does. 

It isn't just the journalism which Theodore White had never seen. Almost surely, he'd never seen a nominee like Donald J. Trump—though he'd also never seen a campaign journalist like the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin.

He'd never seen anything like what transpired, for two solid hours, on last weekend's "cable news" programs. That said, also this:

It's possible that White had never seen anything like the refusal of the New York Times to report on, and to discuss, what happened on those TV programs, but also on the Fox News Channel on a regular basis. It's possible that White had never seen such an avoidance of high-end journalistic duty.

In our view, what has happened on MSNBC has been bad enough. What has happened on the Fox News Channel represents an existential challenge to the American system, imperfect as it has been.

Presumably, there was no perfect journalism during the 1960 campaign. That said:

Theodore White had never seen anything like what was broadcast last weekend. Nor had he ever seen anything like the garbage can the Fox News Channel opens at 10 p.m. each weekday night—or anything like the imitations of journalism which precede that clownlike "cable news" program.

Beyond that, he'd never seen anything like the refusal to report which has been practiced by the modern-day New York Times—but also by the cable news stars on MSNBC, Blue America's "cable news" counterpart.

In effect, White was living in the Big Woods when he wrote his famous book. There was no Mark Levin in those woods. There was no Jesse Watters and there was no Greg Gutfeld. There were no D-list comedians and no former professional wrestler churning out corporate dogma as they pretended to discuss the nation's news.

What happened on Fox last weekend represents a major challenge to us the people—to the American system. For the record, we know of no evidence to suggest that we will be able to meet this challenge in the years ahead.

Next week: Debates

Kayleigh is willing to do and say anything!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

Donald Trump's brilliant debate: We've mentioned this assessment more than once:

In our judgment, E. E. Cummings can now be seen as the greatest anthropologist of the twentieth century. In our view, he surpassed even Gene Brabender, whose great observational bromide went exactly like this:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

Admittedly, that was a brilliant portrait of our flawed human nature. But in our view, Cummings surpassed even the great Brabender in one part of his bitter anti-war poem, Humanity i love you.

We'll post the relevant text below. We raise this point because of what Kayleigh McEnany has now said.

For all we know, Kayleigh McEnany may be the world's most considerate next-door neighbor. Also, no one can say that she's dumb. 

Among other things, she's a graduate of Harvard Law School (2016). With that in mind, we refer you to what she has now said.

She said what she said on Fox & Friends, where she was guest-hosting this morning. At one point, the friends began discussing next week's debate. 

It's hard to believe, but at one point, McEnany said this:

MCENANY (9/5/24): The one thing I will say the Kamala Harris campaign is doing that is smart is they are really lowering expectations.  

David Plouffe put out a tweet saying that President Trump has done more presidential debates than any candidate in history, they're not taking him lightly, and she's the underdog of this debate. 

They're smart to set that expectation. And they're smart to remember that the guy you're looking at—President Donald Trump—ended a fifty-year political career when he debated Joe Biden. 

So if that Donald Trump shows up, it's going to be tough.

We have no idea which Donald Trump will show up at next week's debate. We have no idea how next week's debate will turn out. We think it's a bad idea to hold just one debate this year instead of the traditional three.

That said:

We did watch the disastrous June 27 debate, and what we saw that night was fairly obvious. 

In all likelihood, we saw the two (2) worst performances in the history of such debates.  Trump's performance that night was astoundingly bad. Amazingly, though, for whatever reason, Biden's performance was even worse.

In recent weeks, Trump has begun to say and suggest, out on the trail, that Biden fell apart that night because Trump's own performance had been so brilliant. Plainly, McEnany was making some such suggestion when she said that the superbly experienced Candidate Trump ended Biden's long career with his performance that night.

There is no conceivable way that McEnany really believes that. That said, Fox & Friends is a four-hour daily program devoted to subjecting regular people to relentless four-way propaganda of that ridiculous type.

Of all the last century's anthropologists, Cummings understood this type of behavior best. In the caustic scientific analysis he stated in the form of a poem, he described what he saw people around him doing:

Humanity i love you 

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

There's a bit more to the caustic analysis, but the basic analysis can be seen right there.. In the example under review, we'd be inclined to say that McEnany agreed to "pawn her intelligence to buy a drink." We'll guess that the substitute friend decided to "black the boots of success" through this ridiculous conduct.

Our own father spent his entire adult career at the Old Howard. (This was before our time.) The Marx Brothers played there when they were still known as The Nightingales. During the 1946 World Series, Abbott and Costello—giant movie stars of the era—stopped by the jampacked hall to see old friends at an old stomping ground, then agreed to be brought on stage to perform "Who's on First?"

(We have a beautiful photo of our mother and father and two of our older half-siblings cavorting with the boys in maybe 1942. Costello is pretending to make a play for our older half-sister, Shirley. As he does, she skillfully swats him aside.)

Cummings liked the jokes at the Howard. He didn't admire certain reactions from others in the crowd.

On Fox & Friends, the friends "unflinchingly applaud all [storylines] containing the" viewpoints of the bosses. There's nothing the various friends aren't willing to say and do. 

you are continually committing
nuisances but more

especially in your own house

Our admiration for Cummings grew as we watched McEnany today.

CHALLENGED: There was no Hannity in the Big Woods!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

The Kennedy / Nixon reporters: American media have come a long way since Labor Day 1960. An observer might even think of the way Laura Ingalls Wilder began her famous first book, Little House in The Big Woods:

WILDER (page 1): Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.

The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.

Writing in 1932, Wilder was describing the Wisconsin of the late 1860s—the deeply forested, largely uninhabited Wisconsin of her early childhood and her 1867 birth. 

"There was nothing but woods," she wrote. "There were no houses. There were no roads...There were only trees and wild animals," 

It's a bit like that when we look back to the American media landscape of the early 1960s—to the media landscape within which Candidates Kennedy and Nixon vied for control of the White House. 

There were no national "talk radio" programs. There was no Internet. There was no social media.

There were no "cable news" stations! There was no such thing as the Fox News Channel, or even CNN.

It's as we noted yesterday, based on the reporting by Theodore White in his own famous first book, The Making of The President 1960. Within that limited media landscape, presidential candidates had to struggle, scuffle and strain to gain access to "the cheering mass."

It's as we noted yesterday. On the Friday morning of the Labor Day weekend of 1960, Candidate John F. Kennedy flew from the Washington area on to Maine. He then flew across the country to San Francisco. 

From San Francisco, it was on to Alaska. He then turned his plane back to the east, landing in Detroit on Sunday evening for the formal start, early on the morning of Labor Day, of his White House campaign.

There was no cable news at that time; there was no Internet. A candidate had to fly all around the country, shouting himself hoarse. 

Last week, a vastly different situation prevailed as Candidate Trump sat with the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin to tape a pair of hour-long broadcasts—hour-long programs which aired on Saturday and Sunday nights of this year's Labor Day weekend. 

A vast array of media now stood at a hopeful's command. This profusion has created a challenge to the American political system, but also to us the people—a challenge we the people may not be equipped to negotiate, address or withstand.

The proliferation of media didn't come all at once. As far back as 1992, Candidate Bill Clinton went on Arsenio Hall's late-night TV program to speak directly to millions of people, "over the head of the press."

Last weekend, for better or worse, Candidate Trump took advantage of a similar opportunity. Our systems had come a long way since Candidate Kennedy took that long plane ride to Alaska, followed by that long ride back.

Before we more fully examine what happened on last weekend's airings of Life, Liberty and Levin, it might be worth recalling the portrait Theodore White drew of the men—and presumably, they were all men—who flew around the country with Candidates Kennedy and Nixon back in 1960.

Given the primitive media landscape which prevailed in the big woods of that time, these "forty or fifty men, generally middle-aged," played a highly significant role in the spread of information during the 1960 campaign.  

White's book about that campaign is almost as famous as Wilder's. He described these men, and the role they played in that campaign, in a brief, six-page passage which came fairly late in his book. 

Being one of those men himself, White painted a sympathetic portrait of the conditions they faced as they pursued their role in that important White House campaign. As his portrait started, he pictured those men on those planes:

WHITE (page 333): One must begin any reflection on the press reporting of the 1960 campaign by dissolving the word “press” from mind and replacing it with the picture of forty or fifty men, all veterans of their craft, all proud of their integrity and their calling, most of them having won the right to report the campaign after long careers of merit in their newspapers, magazines, or radio networks—and all of them individuals.

One must see these forty or fifty men, generally middle-aged, rocking groggily off a plane at between one and two in the morning (“Where are we now?” “Do we get our baggage here?” “Hey, where are we sleeping tonight?” “Are they feeding us here or not, do you know?”’), then wearily listening to the worn remarks of the candidate as he greets the greeters, then piling into the bus to be driven half an hour to the hotel (watching for local color as they go), dashing upstairs to the hastily arranged press room (“Are there coffee and sandwiches there?”) and getting the story off. Then to sleep between two and three, to be woken by the hotel clerk (who has been instructed by the advance man that all baggage must be in the lobby at six in the morning); downstairs to fight with the advance men, the staff, the other correspondents for eggs and coffee, before dashing off to hear the breakfast rally...

Borrowing from Langston Hughes, life for those forty or fifty men wasn't "no crystal stair." 

In his evocative portrait, White describes the massive tedium and the persistent indignities involved in covering the 1960 White House campaign. Before he described "what happened, I believe, in the press reporting of the campaign," he offered a further portrait of the journalists in question:

WHITE (page 335): ...The men assigned to cover a Presidential campaign are, normally, the finest in the profession of American journalism—men of seniority and experience, some of them men of deep scholarship and wisdom, all of them full of dignity and a sense of their own importance. Yet for weeks and months they must live like tramps —shaken, rushed, fighting with police at police lines, dirty and unbathed for days on end, herded into buses like schoolboys. Physical care and handling of the correspondents were much alike in both revolving headquarters—the same instantaneous telegraphic and telephonic communications, the same box lunches, the same baggage-laundry-feeding hotel arrangements. But none of this meticulous, logistic care could erase the turbulent reality of reporting, the insane jet-flight quality of the 1960 campaign—or protect the simple individual dignity of men who had to combine the qualities of roustabouts and philosophers under circumstances that inexorably deprived them of the last shreds of dignity.

Who were the people who'd been assigned to report the 1960 campaign for us, the American people, such as we were at the time? White's overall assessment is clear:

In White's account, these forty or fifty men were "all veterans of their craft, all proud of their integrity and their calling." In White's account. most of these men "had won the right to report the campaign after long careers of merit in their newspapers, magazines, or radio networks."

(At that time, "radio networks" were still of great consequence—and that wasn't a reference to the partisan national radio "talk shows" which developed years later.)

According to White, the men who reported this White House campaign were "the finest in the profession of American journalism." They were "men of seniority and experience." Some of them—though apparently not all—were "men of deep scholarship and wisdom, all of them full of dignity," though perhaps with an occasional "sense of their own importance."

It's interesting to see White describe these reporters this way, because—as we noted last week—he goes on to describe astounding journalistic misconduct on the Kennedy plane, as the reporters assigned to cover that candidate began to see themselves as an extension of his campaign. 

("By the last weeks of the campaign, those forty or fifty national correspondents who had followed Kennedy since the beginning of his electoral exertions into the November days had become more than a press corps—they had become his friends and, some of them, his most devoted admirers," White wrote. And yes, it got worse after that.)

For the reporters covering Candidate Nixon, it was a whole different ballgame. Still, they struggled to do their best work, White maintained:

WHITE (page 335-336): What happened, I believe in the press reporting of 1960 was that the sense of dignity of these men, their craftsmen’s pride in their calling, was abused by Mr. Nixon and his staff—and not by accident, but by decision. The brotherhood of the press was considered by Mr. Nixon and his press staff, not a brotherhood, but a conspiracy, and a hostile conspiracy at that; it was as if he accepted them permanently in their uncomfortable and unpleasant campaign role—as vagabonds.

The decision that the press was a conspiracy had been taken long before Mr. Nixon was actually nominated. One of his aides declared to me in June in flat words, “Stuff the bastards. They’re all against Dick anyway. Make them work—we aren’t going to hand out prepared remarks; let them get their pencils out and listen and take notes.” This philosophy was expressed, not only to me, but to any number of members of the brotherhood...

Nor was the hostility between press and the Nixon campaign simply a fruit of this trivial disdain. Predominantly Democratic in orientation, the reporters who followed Nixon were, nonetheless, for the sake of their own careers, anxious to write as well, as vividly, as substantively as possible about him. Yet he held himself aloof; erratically, he would sometimes permit reporters to ride his personal plane and at other times forbid it...Nixon kept to himself, believing (until too late in the campaign) that he could reach the American people over the heads of the press...

White couldn't have known this at the time, but he was sketching a storyline which would prevail right up to the present day—a storyline according to which national journalists were "predominantly Democratic," with many such people seeing themselves as agents of their day's Democratic nominee.

Nothing has ever undermined the power of this enduring portrait—not even the hostile coverage extended to Candidate Gore during Campaign 2000. But even as he described the divergent atmospheres on the two campaign planes, White insisted that his colleagues on the Nixon plane were "anxious to write as well, as vividly, as substantively as possible about him," if only (in some cases) "for the sake of their own careers."

There was no "cable news" in the landscape of that White House campaign. There was no Fox News Channel, not even a CNN.

There was no Sean Hannity in the Big Woods. There was no Morning Joe. 

"Radio networks" still held sway! There were frantic plane rides to Alaska, with other long plane rides back.

The media landscape was very different when Candidate Trump sat down with Mark Levin for the taping of an endless interaction which was scheduled to air on the Labor Day weekend. 

Candidate Trump made no personal appearances on this year's Labor Day. Instead, he had created two hours of air—and his "interview" had been conducted by a type of media figure who had barely existed way back when, in the thinly populated Big Woods of the 1960 campaign.

Levin is an open supporter of Trump, as is his perfect right. That said, a profusion of media now exists—a profusion which presents a serious challenge to our traditional systems. 

Democratic norms are under assault from the inhabitants of today's woods. It isn't clear that we the people will have what it takes to handle this ongoing challenge.

Tomorrow: As aired on the Fox News Channel

What happened to all the Amherst kids?

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2024

Statistics can be hard: In fairness, it doesn't exactly matter. That said, it's the kind of journalistic performance we're always puzzled by.

We refer to a news report in the New York Times—a report about a recent shift in student demographics at several high-end colleges. 

Headline included, the news report starts like this:

At 2 Elite Colleges, Shifts in Racial Makeup After Affirmative Action Ban

A drop in the share of Black first-year students at two elite colleges this school year has provided an early sign that the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action could have an impact on racial diversity, at least at some of the nation’s more selective schools.

At Amherst College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the share of Black students decreased sharply—by eight percentage points—for this year’s entering class, according to data released on Thursday. It decreased more moderately at Tufts University, a larger private college near Boston, according to that school’s data.

Set aside whatever opinion you may have about that Supreme Court decision. We aren't discussing affirmative action today. Instead, we're discussing the frequent oddness of high-end American journalism.

Statistics can be hard! We think the highlighted passage from this same article helps establish that point. We've focused on Amherst only:

The percentage of Black students entering Amherst this fall dropped to 3 percent from 11 percent last year, and at Tufts, it dropped to 4.7 percent from 7.3 percent. Black students at the University of Virginia declined to 7 percent of the entering class compared to 7.9 percent last year.

White students entering Amherst rose to 39 percent of the class from 33 percent, and those entering Tufts went up to 49.3 percent from 46.8 percent. The percentage of Asian American students rose slightly to 20 percent from 18 percent at Amherst and slipped to 19.7 percent from 20.3 percent at Tufts.

The percentage of Hispanic students dropped to 8 percent from 12 percent at Amherst, and there was a similar decline at M.I.T. But confounding the picture, the share of Hispanic students actually rose slightly at Tufts and the University of Virginia. And at U.Va., the percentage of white and Asian students declined very slightly.

Set aside any thoughts you have about the suitability of affirmative action as part of college admissions. Instead, join us in wondering where all the Amherst kids went.

You can do the ciphering yourself! According to the article, the student body at Amherst this year totals up like this:

Amherst student population: 
White: 39%
Black: 3% 
Asian-American: 20%
Hispanic: 8%

Those numbers total 70 percent. Our question would be this:

What have they done with The Amherst College 30 (Percent)?

Please understand:

We're sure the question can be answered. We're sure the answer exists somewhere online. Yesterday, we started to Google around to find it, but then we decided to stop.

Our point is somewhat different! In our view, it's strange to think that the Times would publish those data without noticing that a fairly obvious question might seem to arise—a question which night occur to the newspaper's admittedly brilliant subscribers.

What have they done with the Amherst 30? Also, riddle us this:

Should statistics be this hard?

For extra credit only: We were also puzzled by the puzzlement Bret Stephens expressed in this week's Conversation with Gail Collins. We refer to the highlighted passage:

This Is Not What Trump Had in Mind

[...]

Gail: OK, we’re going to be arguing about this nearly every week, so I’m taking a temporary pass. For a more narrow Harris query: What did you think of her CNN interview?

Bret: She was likable and warm and didn’t do herself any obvious harm. But she leaned heavily on vacuous slogans, like her “new way forward.” I’m struggling to understand how she can present herself as a candidate of change while also defending Joe Biden’s record. What would you suggest she do?

For the record, Stephens is aggressively anti-Trump. Also, we may have liked Harris' performance in the CNN interview somewhat less than Stephens did, but we're puzzled by his puzzlement there. 

Whatever a person may think of Candidate Harris, we think it's fairly clear what she wants to move past as she seeks that new way forward. We think she's made it fairly clear! In principle, we're thrilled by the possibility she has seemed to be holding out.

More, perhaps, tomorrow. Journalistic assessments are hard!

CHALLENGED: Kennedy spoke in Cadillac Square!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2024

In a challenge to our system, Trump spoke of prisons and jails: Way back in 1960, Labor Day could still be said to be the start of the White House campaign. 

As Labor Day approached that year, Candidate John F. Kennedy was all tied up in Washington. Candidate Nixon was already out on the stump as part of the general White House campaign. But Senator Kennedy had to attend to his duties in a previously scheduled Senate summertime session.

Finally, he was released! In The Making of The President 1960, Theodore White described what happened next:

WHITE (page 251): He took off by chartered jet from Friendship Airport in Baltimore on Friday afternoon, September 2nd, as if he meant to swallow the country at a gulp. Friday evening he campaigned in Maine; by Saturday noon he was campaigning in San Francisco; Saturday night he flew to Alaska and then, with only four hours’ sleep, turned the big jet back to the continent and urged it on all day to Detroit, where on Monday, Labor Day, he would officially open his campaign. There, in recent times, Democratic candidates for the Presidency have always opened their campaigns with an appearance at Cadillac Square before the union men of Detroit’s assembly lines, who mass in thousands to hear the candidate make his traditional appeal for labor’s support.

The candidate "arrived two hours late, at 10:15, on Sunday evening at Detroit International Airport," White reported in his influential, iconic book. The candidate "attended a coffee reception at the Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel and then went to bed."

The next day was Labor Day! After three (3) breakfasts and several other ceremonial meetings, it was "out to Cadillac Square in the brilliant sun to address the cheering mass." 

At that point, the day's real stumping began. According to White, the Labor Day picnics were several in number. On the Democratic Party side, this was Labor Day 1960:

The Michigan State Fair first, for five minutes; then the Labor Day Picnic at Pontiac, Michigan (where he received a ceremonial Indian headdress); then the long drive to Flint, Michigan, and another Labor Day Picnic and another speech...; then an airplane flight in the dusk (he had now switched to his own Convair, the “Mother Ship” in which he was to remain for the rest of the campaign) to Muskegon airport; a seven-mile drive through a defile of cheering people holidaying on Labor Day to Pere Marquette Park, where he addressed another Labor Day Picnic, his voice hoarsening by now...and then on to the Dew-Drop Inn of Muskegon to give the Democratic candidate of Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District a lift. A short speech—mainly historical, intertwining Michigan’s history with the history of the Democratic Party—and then out to the airport, taking off at eleven in the evening and arriving in Pocatello, Idaho, at two in the morning...

That was Labor Day 1960 on the Democratic Party side. Due to the invention of new technologies, communication with "cheering masses" of voters is much easier now. 

This past Friday, as the Labor Day weekend began, Candidate Trump spoke to a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania-but what came next was a modern form of campaigning. As we noted yesterday, the candidate appeared as the sole guest on successive Fox News Channel programs—on the hour-long, Saturday and Sunday night broadcasts of the Fox News Channel primetime program, Life, Liberty and Levin.

The Fox News Channel is, by far, the most-watched of our nation's three major "cable news" channels. As we noted in this report, Nielsen reported these viewership numbers for the month of July:

Average primetime viewership, July 2024 
Fox News Channel: 3.5 million
MSNBC: 1.2 million
CNN: 856,000

According to those numbers, Fox came close to doubling the primetime viewership of MSNBC and CNN combined. It was in that context that Candidate Trump sat for two hours of conversation on this high-profile cable news program.

As we noted yesterday, what followed wasn't exactly an "interview," at least not as assessed by normal journalistic standards. An antagonist might even say that what followed barely qualified as "conversation."

The candidate spoke at remarkable length on these hour-long programs. Very few questions were asked, and quite a few of those "questions" barely qualified as such. As we noted yesterday, these were the first three "questions" Trump was "asked" on the Saturday night broadcast:

Question 1, 8:02 p.m.

LEVIN (8/31/24): ...Your book is heavy with firefighters, police officers, coal miners, people who drill for oil, truckers—common people. So let me ask you this:

You spent most of your life around these people. You were a developer. You were a builder. Electricians, plumbers, construction workers of every kind. You created thousands and thousands of middle-class jobs with pensions, medical insurance and so forth and so on. 

Why do you think your opponents get away with claiming to represent the little guy, the middle class, the blue collar worker, when they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with them? And you've spent your entire life around them?

Question 2, 8:11 p.m.

LEVIN: Let me follow up with you. In the book, you have some very compelling photos of the border.

You spent a lot of time on the border. You spent a lot of time working on the border, thinking about the border. Litigating to get the money to build the wall on the border. Opposition from people like Kamala Harris. 

She says if this so-called "bipartisan border bill" hits her desk, she will sign it. Not a single Republican in the House supported it. Three Republicans in the Senate—it was negotiated in secret. 

She never tells us what's in the bill. "Catch and release"—you put an end to that. That's in the bill. It would be a statute.

[...]

She's hiding out from the press.  Is she a liar? Is that why she's hiding out from the press? She doesn't want to tell the American people just how radical she actually is?

Question 3, 8:18 p.m.

LEVIN (holding up Trump's book): It's a fantastic book. [At] 45books.com, you can order it directly. I'm going to tell you, there's so many—I can't possibly cover it all.

TRUMP: No, I know. 

 LEVIN: But you loved being president. You can see it. You were excited about it. You were engaged about it. 

Those were the first three "questions." By the time those questions had been "answered," it was 8:28 p.m. and the Saturday evening program was already half over!

In effect, the candidate was delivering his stump speech, much as Candidate Kennedy had done in Cadillac Square. By now, the existence of "cable news" channels allowed the candidate to deliver his speech to millions of voters at a time, not to the smaller "cheering mass" which greeted Candidate Kennedy.

A critic could say that the rise of this new medium has created a type of challenge to our struggling American systems. That critic could refer to the stream of apparent misstatements delivered by Candidate Trump on this pair of hour-long programs—and to the way his host reacted, or failed to react, to these apparent misstatements.

Let the word go forth to the nations! Candidate Kennedy may also have made some misstatements when he spoke in Cadillac Square! If he did, no one was present to challenge or "fact-check" his statements on an immediate basis. The cheering mass would have heard what the candidate said without journalistic intervention of any immediate kind.

That said, there's little chance that Candidate Kennedy murdered sleep or mangled accuracy to anything resembling the extent that Candidate Trump seemed to do in his pair of hour-long broadcasts last weekend. 

We'll add this observation:

As can be seen from those first three questions, the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin cast himself in the role of advocate during those broadcasts, rather than in the more traditional role of objective journalist.

Tomorrow, we'll look at one of the many statements Candidate Trump made in the course of those two hour-long broadcasts. The statement in question came early in the Saturday program, at 8:07 p.m. 

Given the nature of the candidate's uninterrupted, rambling presentations, it's hard to say exactly where any particular statement began and ended that night. In this case, a mere seven minutes into the program, the statement in question might be said to have started with these remarks about Candidate Harris:

TRUMP (8/31/24): I saw today she wants to build a wall. She fought me, for years, on the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall, but she was one of the people that fought me—one of the Democrats, but one of the people. And you look at how she's changed, and it's so phony, because— 

And all of this stuff— You know, with politics, it's usually their first thought, that's where they are. And her first thought is Marxism...

From there, it was on to familiar claims about the emptying of prisons and jails in Venezuela. These claims have been fact-checked a million times by now. Levin just sat there and listened.

(Further warning: Har Harris flipped on building a wall? As we'll note tomorrow, we'd say it isn't as simple as that.)

On Labor Day 1960, Candidate Kennedy made a speech in Cadillac Square, then journeyed to a series of Labor Day picnics. On Labor Day weekend 2024, Candidate Trump went on a major "cable news" program and spoke at remarkable length to a large number of voters.

He was taking part in a new kind of "journalism." It's a journalism which poses a major challenge to the basic functioning of the American system.

Can our system, such as it is, survive this kind of journalism? As we struggle toward November's election, some of our most important legacy mainstream news orgs don't seem strongly inclined to wonder or to ask.

Tomorrow: Emptying prisons and jails!

When Babe Ruth invented the modern home run!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

But first, Kate Bolduan's question: We spent the day addressing the question of The Surgical Wound That Would Not Heal. (More accurately, that wouldn't heal as of yet.)

For that reason, we'll extend yesterday's side trip into the realm of sport.  First, though, a question from CNN's Kate Bolduan.

This morning, Bolduan interviewed Gretchen Whitmer on CNN News Central. Our question goes exactly like this:

Did Kate Bolduan's question make sense?

BOLDUAN (9/3/24):  In terms of what [Candidate] Harris is promising to get done, is to improve the lives of the middle class. We've heard that in Michigan. 

I want to play for you, with that in mind, what JD Vance said on CNN about her promises to get things done.

VANCE (videotape): If she wants to tackle the affordability crisis or close down the southern border, she should be doing it now. And I think it takes a lot of shame—shamelessness, I should say—to be able to stare at the American people's eyes and say, "I'm going to fix your problems now when I've already been in power for three-and-a-half years."

BOLDUAN: How do you make the case that you're going to get stuff done if you have three-and-a-half years that you haven't gotten it done? Does he have a point?

Do you think that question makes sense? Bolduan has been a much more genial cable news presence of late—but with respect to that question, good God!

At least for today, we're going to leave our question about that question right there. Regarding the realm of sport:

The Chicago White Sox have created a remarkable statistic. They've now lost 41 of their last 45 games.  

Largely because of the dominant role played by starting pitchers, it once would have seemed darn near impossible to create a statistic like that. 

Under current arrangements, the role of the starting pitcher has been scaled back. Does that help explain that statistic?

Finally, one of our favorite data sets! It involves the years during which Babe Ruth invented the modern home run, at least within the MLB context.

No, we're not making this up:

American League home run leaders
1914: Frank Baker, 9
1915: Braggo Roth, 7
1916: Wally Pipp, 12
1917: Wally Pipp, 7
1918: Babe Ruth / Tilly Walker, 11
1919: Babe Ruth, 29
1920: Babe Ruth, 54
1921: Babe Ruth, 59

As President Biden would say, "No joke!" In 1917, Wally Pipp led the American League with seven (7) home runs. Three years later, Ruth hit 54. It was off to the races from there.

(And yes, that was the Wally Pipp—the one who gave way to Lou Gehrig.  Also yes—that was Frank "Home Run" Baker! Revolution was in the air—and it was leaving the park.)

We've never seen a full explanation of the way that (MLB) home run revolution occurred. As a general matter, we're inclined to compare it to the way Bill Russell showed up in the NBA and invented the modern blocked shot.

Meanwhile, God bless (sadly, the late) Kevin Hardy! We sat on the bench next to Sivils, right there in the old Stanford Pavilion, marveling at the way he would pirouette through the lane. (The next day, it was Gary Beban, on his way to a Heisman trophy.)

Hardy never played high school football (or at least so it's still said and so we always heard). He then became a first-team All-American tackle at Notre Dame, which was still Notre Dame at the time. 

(Seventh player chosen in the NFL draft. At 6-5, 270, he was impossibly light on his feet.)

Back to Bolduan's question for Whitmer:

We'd have to say that no one ever really "invented" questions like that!

Final assessment: Regarding Vance's question, we'd be inclined to go with this:

In a word, Sad!

CHALLENGED: Are we the people up to the challenge?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2024

Democracy dies in these ways:  Labor Day has come and gone. In this election year, we the people now face a major challenge—a major challenge we'll continue to face going forward, in the years ahead.

Our major party nominees also face challenges as the election approaches. Beyond that, challenges now confront an array of our major news orgs.

Such challenges confront the Fox News Channel, but also the New York Times. But most of all, the challenges confront the people—us.

Let's steal a page from Theodore White by adapting the way he opens his famous book, The Making of the President 1960. Let's take a look at some of the ways our nation's public discourse was functioning as the Labor Day weekend proceeded.

We'll start with this past weekend's edition of Fox News Sunday. The weekly program is one of several on the Fox News Channel which do, in fact, approximate "fairness and balance."

As always, Shannon Bream sat in the anchor chair—and she isn't a propagandist. In the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, this was the composition of her Sunday panel:

Fox News Sunday, Sunday panel, 9/1/24
Matt Gorman: Former senior adviser to Senator Tim Scott
Marie Harf: Former State Department spokesperson (Obama administration, 2013-2015)
Jeff Mason: White House correspondent, Reuters
Roger Zakheim: Director, The Ronald Reagan Institute

Two Republicans and one Democrat, along with one mainstream journalist. Under current arrangements, that counts as basically fair. 

Bream conducted a sane if anodyne discussion of the upcoming election. So it went this past weekend on Fox News Sunday, with Labor Day coming up fast. 

On NBC's Meet the Press, the corresponding panel also featured commentators from both major political tribes. Elsewhere, journalistic procedures were perhaps somewhat different. 

On Saturday and Sunday nights, the Fox News Channel's Mark Levin devoted his regular hour-long program to an extended interview with one lone guest—with Candidate Donald J. Trump. 

Each of the programs ran a full hour. But was Levin really conducting an "interview" as he spoke with Trump?

Plainly, Levin is an undisguised conservative, as is his perfect right. That said, he has also sometimes been described as "The Man Who Screams."

Levin may not always be "fair and balanced" on his Fox News Channel program. Fairly or otherwise, his Wikipedia profile says such things as this:

Mark Levin

Mark Reed Levin is an American broadcast news analyst, columnist, lawyer, political commentator, radio personality, and writer. He is the host of syndicated radio show The Mark Levin Show, as well as Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox News....Since 2015, Levin has been editor-in-chief of the Conservative Review and is known for his incendiary commentary.

He has been described as "right-wing" by The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and Politico. He is known for his strident criticisms of Democrats and encouragement of primary challenges to congressional Republicans that he considers to be "Republican In Name Only" (RINO). He endorsed Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries and declared himself "Never Trump," but reluctantly endorsed Donald Trump after he won the Republican nomination. Since the start of the Trump presidency, Levin's commentary has become pro-Trump.

[...]

A 2016 study which sought to measure incendiary discourse on talk radio and TV found that Levin scored highest on its measure of "outrage." The study looked at 10 prominent radio and television programs known for incendiary discourse on political matters, and scored content on the basis of whether it used "emotional display," "misrepresentative exaggeration," "mockery," "conflagration," "slippery slope," "insulting" or "obscene language" and other factors, finding that Levin was the radio host who engaged in the most outrage. 

The study found that he utilized "outrage speech or behavior at a rate of more than one instance per minute." In How Democracies Die, Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write that Mark Levin was among the popular right-wing talk radio hosts who "helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse" in American politics and contribute to the erosion of democratic norms. According to Politico, Levin has a "penchant for hysteria."

In all candor, there is no "objective" or "scientific" way to determine which talk radio/TV host "engages in the most outrage." Also, the claim that some commentator "has a penchant for hysteria" will always, in the end, be a subjective assessment.

That said, Levin is plainly "pro-Trump" at this time, as is his perfect right. For better or worse, this penchant helped produce a slightly unusual type of interview on these successive nights.

Consider what happened on Saturday night's edition of Life, Liberty & Levin:

As the program began, Levin praised "a fantastic new book" by his guest—a book which will be released next week. 

This is fairly standard fare on TV interview programs. But two minutes into the program, after brief pleasantries had been exchanged, this was the first "question" Levin directed at Trump:

LEVIN (8/31/24): ...Your book is heavy with firefighters, police officers, coal miners, people who drill for oil, truckers—common people. So let me ask you this:

You spent most of your life around these people. You were a developer. You were a builder. Electricians, plumbers, construction workers of every kind. You created thousands and thousands of middle-class jobs with pensions, medical insurance and so forth and so on. 

Why do you think your opponents get away with claiming to represent the little guy, the middle class, the blue collar worker, when they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with them? And you've spent your entire life around them?

Technically, that qualifies as a question. In response to that first question, Trump spoke, without interruption, for the next eight minutes.

Trump's presentation featured a wide array of apparent errors of fact, but also an array of wild speculations. Nothing he said was directly connected to the question he had been asked.

He trafficked in the usual nicknames, denouncing "Comrade Kamala" as "a radical left Marxist" who is "much higher on the [Marxist] scale than Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren." Also, "They call her the greatest flip-flopper," the candidate said at one point.

None of the candidate' factual claims were ever challenged or questioned. Instead, eleven minutes into the program, Levin offered his second question.

He framed it as a type of "follow-up" question. That question went like this:

LEVIN: Let me follow up with you. In the book, you have some very compelling photos of the border.

You spent a lot of time on the border. You spent a lot of time working on the border, thinking about the border. Litigating to get the money to build the wall on the border. Opposition from people like Kamala Harris. 

She says if this so-called "bipartisan border bill" hits her desk, she will sign it. Not a single Republican in the House supported it. Three Republicans in the Senate—it was negotiated in secret. 

She never tells us what's in the bill. "Catch and release"—you put an end to that. That's in the bill. It would be a statute.

Work permits for illegal aliens. You said, "No way." Taxpayer-funded lawyers for illegal aliens—in the bill! Five thousand illegal aliens a day, 1.8 million a year. In four years time, that's a lot of illegal aliens 

TRUMP: And it would be much higher than that.

LEVIN: And it would be higher because of all the got-aways. Billions to sanctuary cities. Billions to pro-illegal alien NGOs. And Senator Chris Murphy and others said, "Don't worry, the border's not going to be closed."

So she runs around—this is a bigger issue.  You say "flip-flop." If you're a flip-flopper, you're a liar. You either lied before, or you're lying now. 

She's hiding out from the press.  Is she a liar? Is that why she's hiding out from the press—she doesn't want to tell the American people just how radical she actually is?

Technically, that was a question—though it could perhaps be viewed as a leading question. 

As with Trump's initial eight-minute ramble, this second "question" contained quite a few claims which called for basic fact-checking. But so it went atter eight minutes, as Levin "followed up."

In response to that second question, Trump talked until the first commercial break, fourteen minutes into the program. When the program returned from that break, Levin posed this third question:

LEVIN (holding up Trump's book): It's a fantastic book. [At] 45books.com, you can order it directly. I'm going to tell you, there's so many—I can't possibly cover it all.

TRUMP: No, I know. 

LEVIN: But you loved being president. You can see it. You were excited about it. You were engaged about it. 

Eighteen minutes into the program, that was the complete text of Levin's third "question" for Candidate Trump! 

"Well, I loved doing a great job for the country," Trump now said as he started to speak—and he continued to speak, without interruption, until the end of the program's second segment, a full eight minutes later. And so it went, for the full two hours, on Saturday and Sunday's editions of Life, Liberty & Levin.

Is there something "wrong" with conducting an "interview" in this particular manner? That would be a matter of judgment. But this clearly wasn't the kind of "serious journalistic interview" Candidate Harris has been criticized for avoiding.

Last Thursday night, Candidate Harris did in fact sit for her first network interview since becoming the Democratic Party's nominee for president. In our view, her performance was less than fully impressive, as was that of her running mate. She's likely to face several different types of challenges in the two months ahead.

We'll start to discuss those apparent challenges in the course of this week. We'll also start to discuss some of the challenges facing our nation's major news orgs—news orgs like the Fox News Channel, news orgs like the New York Times.

Many people and entities are facing serious challenges as November's election approaches. But we the people are facing the largest challenge of all. 

That challenge goes something like this:

For all our high-fallutin' talk—for all the praise we tend to bestow on ourselves—are we the people really up to the challenge of conducting a sensible public discourse? As a nation, are we Americans up to the challenge of conducting an intelligent White House campaign?

The so-called "democratization of media" has placed a major strain on our various political and journalistic systems. Given these circumstances, are we the people up to the challenge of conducting a sane public discourse? Are we capable of behaving like the "rational animals" it has long been said that we are?

A sensible person might imaginably regard Levin's interview with Candidate Trump as perhaps a bit of a journalistic aberration—as an imitation of serious journalistic life. Quite a bit of the conduct on Fox News Channel programs flies in the face of serious journalistic practice. Indeed, much of the conduct on this "cable news" channel flies in the face of basic Enlightenment values.

Alas! The so-called "democratization of media" has turned our struggling nation's discourse into a type of Babel. Major elements of this societal problem are on display among some of the voters of Red America, and among the organizations which serve or pretend to serve them. 

At this time, it isn't necessarily all that great over in Red America. That said, those of us in Blue America also may have—or so it says here—a whole lot of splainin' to do.

Tomorrow: Challenges facing Candidate Harris

HOLIDAY: Pacific-10 dominance shocks world again!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2024

What Beban was like way back when: Forgive us for treating this as a holiday after another magnificent Pacific-10 win.

We refer to Southern Cal's magnificent win over LSU last night. Joining that game to earlier losses by Florida and Texas A&M, we're reminded of the rule by which the SEC remains the dominant conference:

If you don't count the games a conference has lost, that means it has won every game!

On days like this, we recall the great day when Southern Cal battled UCLA with the whole world at stake. The leading authority on all the greatness remembers the greatness right here:

1967 UCLA vs. USC football game

The 1967 UCLA vs. USC football game was a historically significant American college football game played during the 1967 NCAA University Division football season on November 18, 1967. The UCLA Bruins, 7–0–1 and ranked No. 1, with senior quarterback Gary Beban as a Heisman Trophy candidate, played the USC Trojans, 8–1 and ranked No. 4, with junior running back O. J. Simpson also as a Heisman candidate. This game is widely regarded as the signature game in the UCLA–USC rivalry as well as one of the 20th-century Games of the Century. The 64-yard run by Simpson for the winning touchdown is regarded as one of the greatest run plays in college football.

For the rest of the story, just click that link.  As it turned out, Beban won the Heisman that year. The running back just had to wait. 

With respect to Beban, ask us about our brush with greatness! It dates to his days at Sequoia High, where he amassed about three thousand miles of total offense as (we think) a single-wing tailback, but came off the bench as sixth man on the school's basketball team.

As a mere sophomore, we were allowed to watch him from the bench at the Stanford Tournament of Champions. Kevin Hardy's team won the whole thing, having beaten us by a point in the semifinals the night before. 

At 6-5 and 270, Hardy was astoundingly light on his feet. (We sat there with Sivils, utterly puzzled by what we were seeing out there.) He became an All-American tackle at Notre Dame, which was still Notre Dame at the time, though football may not have been his best sport.

Could we ourselves have gone to UCLA? We could have done it, but it would have been wrong! Pushed hard, we usually offer this:

It would have been unfair to Kareem.

We tend to leave it right there, only saying it's time to move on.

At any rate, those were the days of Pacific coast dominance, "when we were very poor and very happy," before "the rich came into our lives" and before the Deep State came along. 

Tomorrow: It starts

SUNDAY: Vulgar and crass, the New York Times said!

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2024

Though only on page A12:  We didn't get what we requested—but what we got was a start.

Once again, we refer to an (extensive) news report in the New York Times. Last Thursday, the report appeared online, beneath this dual headline:

Trump Keeps Turning Up the Dial on Vulgarity. Will He Alienate the Voters He Needs?
Donald J. Trump has been reposting racially and sexually charged insults of Kamala Harris, continuing a history of crass attacks...

We're dropping a part of that second headline in which, in our view, the Times chased pointless speculation. But at long last, the Times decided to treat the vulgarity of Candidate Trump—his history of crass attacks; his racially and sexually charged insults—as a stand-alone news topic all by itself:

As what it so plainly is!

When this extensive report appeared online, we said we hoped the Times would run it on the front page of Sunday's print editions.

As it turned out, the New York Times wasn't quite ready to exercise that much good judgment. Instead, the Times ran the report in Saturday's print editions—and only on paper A12.

This candidate's astonishing conduct deserves a higher profile. That said, we'll describe this lengthy report as a decent first step.

The report was written by Bensinger, Yourish and Gold. In our view, the report begins with an overly broad frame of reference:

Trump Keeps Turning Up the Dial on Vulgarity. Will He Alienate the Voters He Needs?
Donald J. Trump has been reposting racially and sexually charged insults of Kamala Harris, continuing a history of crass attacks...

Over his decades in the public eye, former President Donald J. Trump has a well-established history of making degrading and racist remarks about women, people of color and pretty much anyone else who crosses his path.

It is a proclivity that dates to his days as a reality television star and that has only expanded in the meme-driven era of social media. In the words of Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, Mr. Trump is “an equal opportunity offender.”

But in Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump has found a particularly complicated and risky target for his trademark brand of transgression, as more Americans are suddenly tuning in to what has become a highly competitive race.

Although there are no clear signs that Mr. Trump has increased the quantity of abuse he levels at his opponents, his decision to repost a string of sexually and racially charged broadsides in recent weeks suggests that he has turned up the dial when it comes to pure vulgarity and crudeness.

In our view, editors should have dropped the highly subjective reference to allegedly "racist" remarks. Also this:

In our view, there was no reason to talk about a decades-old "proclivity"—an alleged proclivity for which no examples are given.

At issue is Candidate Trump's behavior right now—the vulgar, crass insults referenced in that dual headline. That stream of invective from this candidate is, in fact, "particularly unusual in modern politics"—an accurate framework which appeared in a similar report in the Washington Post.

The fact that this behavior is so unusual is a large part of what makes the behavior news. In our view, that's where this important report should have begun—but soon enough, the three reporters went where the rubber has been meeting the road:

Since July 21, when President Biden stepped out of the race and endorsed Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump has directed a seemingly constant fusillade of invective at a challenger who happens to be Black, South Asian and female.

In a little over five weeks, in speeches, social media posts and interviews, Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “wack job”; a “communist”; “dumb as a rock”; “real garbage”; “a bum”; and, employing a phrase he applies almost exclusively to women, “nasty.” In early August, he reposted an image depicting Ms. Harris as a dung beetle with her face covered in what appears to be blackface while astride a coconut. And he has made or amplified innuendo-laden references to his opponent’s long-ago relationship with the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, suggesting she traded sexual favors to accelerate her political career.

“She had a very good friend named Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump said at a rally on Aug. 3. “He knows more about her than anybody’s ever known. He could tell you every single thing about her, could tell you stories that you’re not going to want to hear.”

At a convention for Black journalists in Chicago last month, he questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity, saying that she only recently “became a Black person.” And in addition to a post on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform, which made a crude reference to Ms. Harris and oral sex, Mr. Trump this month reshared a video of a singer in a parody video saying that Ms. Harris has spent her life “down on her knees.”

By modern political norms, this is astoundingly unusual conduct. That's what makes this gruesome behavior a stand-alone news topic—a serious topic which, in our view, should be reported on the front page..

We think this should have been on page one! At any rate, as the Times report continues, so do the examples of this candidate's remarkable conduct:

Although he returned to the X platform this month, nearly all of the off-color content Mr. Trump has amplified has been confined to his own site, which has become a kind of echo chamber for MAGA content.

In that politically homogenous, criticism-free context, Mr. Trump’s posts are constantly answered with racist and sexist memes by ardent followers in hopes that the former president will repost them, a badge of honor in MAGA circles. In recent weeks, social media has been awash in digitally manipulated and crude images of Ms. Harris that were created by Mr. Trump’s supporters showing her in sexual situations, often unclothed or in lingerie.

The post that Mr. Trump shared on Wednesday on Truth Social—a screenshot from X that showed an image of Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton and another user’s reply: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” —was a reply to one of Mr. Trump’s own posts on the site.

Finally, the Times was willing to report the reference to "blowjobs" which this former president had reposted.  

As we've reported, the Fox News Channel opens a garbage can of this type every weekday evening at 10 o'clock. That should be treated as major news too—but in this case, the garbage can is being opened by one of our two White House candidates:

An anonymous account with the handle @beware_the_penguin posted the ["blowjobs"] screenshot on Truth Social. In recent weeks, that same account has uploaded and shared dozens of highly sexualized images about Ms. Harris on the platform. At least one other, more PG-rated post from that account, depicting Ms. Harris hiding from reporters under a table, was also reposted by Mr. Trump.

The oral-sex remark came from the account of a pro-Trump podcaster who calls himself Zeek Arkham. The comment alludes to Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, who admitted to having a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and to Ms. Harris’s relationship with Mr. Brown in the mid-1990s.

We're sorry to see that the New York Times is still defining Monica Lewinsky as "a White House intern." In the realm of exciting tales, some designations are too time-honored to drop.

(In fact, she was a full-time federal employee during the ginormous bulk of her relationship with President Clinton.) 

That said, the reporters were correctly treating Candidate Trump's behavior as what it plainly is. It's a vast departure from conventional political norms—and on that basis, it qualifies as a stand-alone, highly important news topic

So is such remarkable conduct as this:

On Wednesday, he boosted at least four posts making reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as altered images depicting Ms. Harris and other Democratic leaders in orange prison jumpsuits and other posts calling for former President Barack Obama to be tried in a military tribunal.

Astonishing behavior of this type should be treated as major, front-page news. Yesterday, the Times took a halting step in that direction

As we've long noted, it has long seemed to us that Candidate Trump is badly disordered, in a clinical sense. (As you may recall, it had seemed to us, since last August, that President Biden might perhaps be cognitively impaired in some significant way.)

President Biden has dropped from the race. Candidate Trump remains.

In this, and in various other ways, this candidate's behavior is extremely unusual. We refer here to his endless, wild misstatements of fact, as well as to his endless string of crass, vulgar public insults.

Not being crazy ourselves, we regard such bizarre behavior as major, front-page news. In future reports about this stunning behavior, that's where the timorous souls at the New York Times should screw up their courage and place it.