Good morning. It is December 17th. It is a gray and much too warm morning in New York City, but at least it's supposed to brighten up later, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and its pollster Ann Selzer, accusing them NBC reports, of “consumer fraud” for the poll right before the election that found Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points in Iowa. The state went to Trump by 13 points. Seltzer said she's getting out of polling afterwards. But NBC writes that “the suit says it seeks accountability for brazen election interference.” Four more years of harassing lawsuits on Trump's chosen theme of I know you are, but what am I? This is obviously bullying and dictatorial behavior designed to have more news outlets, like ABC News, as the newsletter covered yesterday, apologize for saying anything negative about Trump, even when it's accurate. But there also seems to be some kind of weird self-destructive compulsion in the mix on Trump's side. Given the impenetrable blanket of criminal immunity that his Supreme Court wrapped him in, he's not just planning to use his executive powers to safely commit crimes, but insisting on mixing it up in civil court, where, as in the ABC case, before ABC caved, he's still bound by discovery and required to sit for depositions, answering hostile questions under oath. It's as if there's no degree of protection he can get, sufficient to keep him from seeking out new ways to get in trouble. 

Axios reports that Jeff Bezos is struggling to find anyone to be the executive editor of the Washington Post. The situation, Axios writes, is so dire that “two candidates to run the paper, Cliff Levy of the New York Times and Meta's Ann Kornblut, a former Post editor, both withdrew from consideration for the top newsroom job over the paper's strategy, sources involved in the process say.” Part of the problem seems to be former Murdoch hatchet man Will Lewis, the CEO of The Post. One person involved in the search, Axios reports, “told us Lewis's pitch was foggy and uninspiring.” It also says “a few candidates were asked to write six page memos, a hallmark of Amazon culture.” I mean, also a hallmark of getting a job in media. Like, what blessed career track have Axios' Mike Allen and Sarah Fischer been on, that they find the idea of writing a job memo to be some weird import from the Amazon side, rather than the standard way that publications harvest story ideas and other suggestions, by treating job applicants as unpaid consultants, or occasionally paid consultants, credit where it's due. Anyway, back to the news. “A few candidates were asked to write six-page memos, ahallmark of Amazon culture about their journalistic vision for the paper, using AI and how to grow the post's audience.” My memo on how a major American newspaper should use AI is one line long. It reads, absolutely don’t, you idiots. If you're listening to the podcast and your news organization could use these kinds of key insights, let me know. I'll happily give you more of them for money.

A look at the front page of this morning's New York Times leaves the eyes skipping around in bafflement about what isn't there. A 15 year old girl opening fire in her school in Wisconsin, armed with a 9 millimeter handgun and reportedly leaving behind a racist and antisocial manifesto, didn't even rate a front page referral box. It just gets a stubby little piece across the top of A14, “three dead including suspect and at least six hurt in Wisconsin school shooting.” The actual act of violence by someone who may well have harbored neo-Nazi beliefs, gets approximately half as much space as the story on the facing page, “Private schools group apologizes after claims of anti-Semitism at event. A prominent national private schools group has apologized for remarks some speakers made at a conference about diversity and inclusion this month after leaders of several Jewish organizations condemned the comments as anti-Semitic.” 

Despite the length of the piece, and the fact that the Times says the remarks were recorded, the story somehow includes no more than two individual words in quotes to describe what was said. “The keynote speaker,” the Times reports, “was Dr. Susan Barakat, who,” the Times writes, “emerged as a prominent voice on the topic of anti-Muslim violence after her brother, his wife, and his wife's sister were killed by a neighbor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2015 in what Dr. Barakat has described as a hate crime.” I mean, I recall there being more evidence in that direction than one person’s say-so. Anyway, “some conference attendees,” the Times writes, “took exception to Dr. Barakat's characterization of the establishment of the Israeli state as colonialist and Zionism as based in,” here's the first quote, “racist,” end quote, “principles. She also characterized the war as a,” quote, “genocide,” end quote, “to applause from attendees, according to recordings of portions of the speech.” Feels like if you're going to publish a big newspaper story, accusing someone of bigotry, you could quote more than two individual words from recordings of portions of a speech they made, especially when one of those two words in particular is being pretty widely used in official channels in the way that its use is described here. 

What is on page one in the lead slot, is “Europe rattled as Germans vote government out,” another classic Timesian elevation of imputed vibes because of an event over the event itself. Europe “rattled,” like you talked to all of Europe, and it said we're feeling “rattled,” or did the whole continent make a physical rattling sound? Why not just “German government falls in no confidence vote?” That is what happened, as the story says “the German government collapsed on Monday as Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in parliament, deepening the crisis of leadership across Europe at a time of…” Who gives a shit about deepening a crisis of leadership? The country with the world's third largest economy just dumped its leader, and you can't even make it through one sentence about that fact without flying off into some weird bullshit about how everybody else feels. Completely pathological behavior. The gasbag would-be analysis isn't even as good as writing. “Coming just nine months before parliamentary elections had been scheduled to happen,” the Times writes, “the vote was an extraordinary moment for Germany. The elections, now expected on Feb. 23, will be only the fourth snap election in the 75 years since the modern state was founded. The moment reflects a new era of more fractious and unstable politics in a country long known for durable coalitions built on plodding consensus.” Why is “moment” appearing twice in the same paragraph? Stop trying to write history and just write news.

Next column over. “Turkey's sway in Syria spells a risk for Kurds. Minority group is key U.S. ally versus ISIS.” Once again, the destabilization of a bad government in the Middle East is threatening a pocket of relative stability that the Kurds carved out for themselves. “The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces,” the Times writes, “have been America's most reliable partner in Syria. But,” the Times writes “Turkey, which shares a border with Syria, has long considered the Kurdish group to be its enemy. The Turkish government believes the Kurdish fighters in Syria are allied with the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which has fought the Turkish state for decades.” Surely Donald Trump won't let President Erdogan do anything bad to our friends. 

Down at the bottom of the page, “weird sightings in sky so far have very boring backstory.” A piece about how the frenzy over drone sightings on the East Coast seems to be mostly a frenzy over airplane sightings. After the jump, the story says “As experts and officials tried to calm concerns, President-elect Donald J. Trump continued to stir people up. Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Mr. Trump said on Monday that he was canceling a trip to his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, because drones had been spotted there. ‘The government knows what is happening,’ he said. Mr. Trump asserted, without evidence, that the military knew where the drones took off from. As president-elect, Mr. Trump receives intelligence briefings, but he did not say whether he had received one about the incidents.” 

That piece of the news reappears on page A12. “Trump holds forth on vaccines, the media, and drones.” A write-up of the press conference that Trump gave yesterday. His full remarks are even more rambling and paranoid. “Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it's a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don't want to comment.” Talking out both sides of his mouth, as usual, Trump also said that we are not going to lose the polio vaccine, but also said, “I don't like mandates about vaccine mandates in schools,” and said Ron DeSantis will “make the right decision” about whether to appoint Lara Trump, Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, to the Senate seat in Florida that Marco Rubio is leaving to become Secretary of State. And he threatened to sue various press outlets, following through later on with the Des Moines Register suit, and again, all this is inside the paper, the threats and nonsense and lies from the incoming president, like the 15 year old girl shooting up a school, are just background noise. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening The indignity morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho Our podcasting work is sustained by the subscription dollars and tips that you the listeners provide. Please click those buttons to keep those coming. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again tomorrow.