Good morning. It is July 25th. It is already hot and supposed to get much, much hotter here in New York City. The weather box on the front of this morning's New York Times says thunderstorms late and then tonight gusty thunderstorms early. The weather app on the phone doesn't mention thunderstorms and just says there's a heat advisory. The National Weather Service appears to still be publishing its heat risk map, and there's a band of red or major stretching almost unbroken save for the heights of the Appalachians from New York City almost all the way to Little Rock. Another arm of the warning reaches down the coast to Charlotte and it looks like Boston gets its own island of red in the surrounding sea of orange or moderate heat risk. So stay indoors out there if that makes sense. 

In the lead spot on the front of this morning's New York Times, where the words and a headline would usually go, is a four-column picture of two figures floating on a dark background, a Palestinian woman in a headscarf, cradling one of the children of Gaza. The caption says that his name is Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, and that he is about 18 months old. His limbs are withered, every bone of his spine and his shoulder blades show through his skin. And the caption says that his mother says that he was born healthy, but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. Below the caption, just above the fold is the headline, “Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There Is Nothing’” Then in the subhead, whatever it is that's fundamentally wrong with the Times, manages to assert itself.
“A Trading of Blame as Chaos and Violence Hit Aid Routes.” Just a bizarre reflexive desire in the shadow of its own knowledge and reporting to turn mass murder into some sort of political dispute that the spirit of objective journalism can observe with detachment. There is nothing else in the front page story that has anything to do with a trading of blame. It opens with a previously healthy 17 year old boy, now in intensive care with severe malnutrition and not responding to treatment according to his father. The Times writes “Gaza's hospitals have struggled since early in the war to cope with the influx of Palestinians injured and maimed by Israeli airstrikes and more recently by shootings meant to disperse desperate crowds as they surge toward food convoys or head to aid distribution sites.” As in the earlier coverage, it seems remarkably charitable to grant the Israeli military forces, who have made gunning down crowds of starving civilians into a routine practice, with any sort of intention to disperse crowds. The story continues. “Now, according to doctors in the territory, an increasing number of their patients are suffering and dying from starvation. ‘There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself,’ said Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra who leads the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. ‘I am speaking to you as a health official, but I too am searching for flour to feed my family.’ The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, said this week that the hunger crisis in Gaza had reached new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row. Dr. al-Farra said the number of children dying of malnutrition had risen sharply in recent days. He described harrowing scenes of people too exhausted to walk.” And that is where the story reaches the jump to be continued on page 86. And so far there is not one word in there about a trading of blame. There is simply the depiction of people targeted in a military campaign starving to death. After the jump, after some more facts and anecdotes, including the case of an 11 month old baby born healthy who should weigh 20 pounds and is under nine instead, and the news that the Gaza Ministry of Health has reported more than 40 hunger-related deaths this month, including 16 children, then that much-promised blame game arrives. “Throughout the war, the Times writes, UN agencies and independent aid groups have accused Israel of allowing far too little food into Gaza, warning of impending famine for its more than 2 million people. For much of that time, Israel has said that enough food was reaching Gaza, blaming diversions by Hamas and mismanagement by aid groups for problems.”

It's necessary to present this as a disagreement between two sides of a question, even if one side of the question is a country waging war and the other side of the question is international observers and aid groups. And even if the Times knows that the Israeli side of it is a lie, as it documents in the very next paragraph, “hollow-eyed skeletal children”  the Times writes, “languish on hospital beds or are cared for by parents who gaze helplessly at protruding ribs and shoulder blades, and emaciated limbs resembling brittle sticks. The haunting scenes are a stark contrast to the plenty that exists just a few miles away, across the borders with Israel and Egypt.” Then it goes through still more cases of individual children who are starving, and describes Israel's imposition of a total blockade of food, followed by the creation of inadequate and dysfunctional distribution systems. And then once again, the spirit of how the Times as an institution believes that news coverage should sound asserts itself. And the paper writes, “the hunger crisis is the result of human failings with each of the involved parties blaming someone else for the suffering. Israel,” the Times writes, “accuses Hamas of engineering a narrative of starvation by looting aid trucks and disrupting the distribution of aid to Gazans. It also accuses the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations of failing to collect hundreds of truckloads of aid that have piled up on the Gaza side of the border crossings.” Then rebalancing the rebalanced ledger, The Times writes, “Aid groups blame Israel for laying siege to Gaza, restricting supplies and failing to provide safe routes for their convoys inside Gaza. The only solution, they have long said, is an extensive increase in food deliveries. The story then says “Israel countered the images of starving children this week with images of pallets of supplies lying uncollected on the Gaza side of a border crossing and footage of what the military described as Hamas terrorists enjoying platters of food and fresh fruit in the group's underground tunnels. The military declined to say when the video was recorded.” 

Below all that carefully managed back and forth, there's a whole separate story not incorporated into the main one. “Cabinet member says Israel has no duty to feed enemies and is expelling Gazans.”

“Amid rising starvation in the Gaza Strip,” the Times writes there, “an Israeli government minister said on Thursday that Israel had no duty to alleviate hunger in the territory and was seeking to expel its population. Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right lawmaker who leads Israel's heritage ministry, said in a radio interview ‘there is no nation that feeds its enemies,’ adding that ‘the British didn’t feed the Nazis, nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.’ He concluded that the government was ‘rushing toward Gaza being wiped out,’ while also ‘driving out the population that educated its people on the ideas of ‘Mein Kampf,’’ an antisemitic text written by Adolf Hitler.” The Times did not fact-check those historical claims, which aren't really true. “The Office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the story says, “declined to comment on whether Mr. Eliyahu's remarks had represented the government's official position. Hours later, the Israeli Embassy in Washington said in a statement that Mr. Eliyahu's comments
did not reflect the policy of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government, which, it said, had provided aid to Gazan civilians with determination and commitment.” Determination and commitment to do what? 

Back on page one, the next story over on the top of the page is Trump Clashes With Fed Chair In a Rare Visit / Pressing Powell on Cost of Bank’s Renovation.” 

“President Trump sparred on Thursday with Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve over the cost of renovations to the central bank's headquarters in Washington during a tour of the active construction site. The visit by the president and other top White House officials was arranged to find evidence to back up allegations by the administration that Mr. Powell had mismanaged the costly project.” That is a bizarre description of the event. It was in no way a fact-finding mission. It was a staged event featuring, as the Times makes clear, Powell's most committed enemies, and the real news importance of the story does not appear until a sentence split around the jump. “Presidents,” the Times writes eventually, “do not typically go to the central bank in an official capacity, reflecting the long-standing independence of the institution from the White House. The last time was in 2006 when President George W. Bush attended the swearing-in of Ben Bernanke as Fed chair.” Powell himself, the target of the attack, doesn't get to talk until after that. “The tour quickly exposed tensions between the president and Mr. Powell,” the Times writes. “Mr. Trump, standing next to the Fed chair, said the renovation costs had ballooned to $3.1 billion, beyond the $2.5 billion that the central bank has indicated. Mr. Powell shook his head in disagreement and questioned where the number came from. Mr. Trump pulled out a piece of paper summarizing the costs, which included already completed renovations to the William McChesney Martin building at the Fed. ‘You just added in a third building is what that is.’ Mr. Powell told Mr. Trump ‘it was built five years ago.’ Mr. Trump responded saying he was talking about the overall work.” And the story describes how Trump lobbied on camera for lower interest rates. If I were writing a news story about the president going to the Federal Reserve to put public pressure on the chairman and having the chairman point out with cameras rolling that the president's complaint was essentially a fabrication. 

I would make that the top of the story, an official who the president is trying to push out, despite lacking the legal authority to do so openly fighting back against the president, when subjected to a staged struggle session, seems like the noteworthy aspect of what happened, and notably that was how the Times website played it, in the collection of live blog items and squibs from which the front page story was assembled online the headline is “Powell fact-checks Trump on cost of Fed renovations” and their dispute makes it into the third paragraph, after what's otherwise the same lead as the print story and a separate live blog entry has the headline “Face to face Powell told Trump He was wrong about a construction project.” Somebody needs to let the live blog editor into the page one meeting.

Next to the print version in another piece that seems to be framed to look away from the news. “FRENETIC SEARCH OF EPSTEIN FILES, AND NOTHING NEW / ENORMOUS OPERATION / F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Scour for Anything to Quiet Trump Base.” It's an account of how the Trump administration found itself unable to manufacture any useful controversy for its purposes out of the 100,000 pages of evidence in the case of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and how that made Trump's base which had been promised Epstein material to use against its enemies, very upset which is an improvement over the NEWS ANALYSIS story earlier this week where the Times obligingly transcribed Steve Bannon's message that the Epstein situation was no problem for the president, but it still seems pretty outdated, next to the ongoing news cycles fed by the Wall Street Journal dealing with the in-no-way novel, but ever more clearly illustrated fact that Donald Trump himself was one of Epstein's closest friends for years. 

Those are the Epstein files people are talking about, But it's the Wall Street Journal that owns that story. 

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 Max Scocca-Ho.

You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Please keep those coming if you can. Vacation season is upon us and the Indignity Morning Podcast Studio anticipates a two week shutdown unless some un-ignorable piece of news breaks, and I find myself with unstructured time and a connection to the Internet, but, assuming nothing unexpected happens in either direction, we will talk again on August 11th.