Good morning. It's December 6th. It is bright and cold in New York City, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The front of this morning's print New York Times retrieved from the sunken entrance to the garden level apartment after the wind blew the unsecured paper off the scoop and scattered the sections down there, breaks from the usual visual hierarchy of the news by having no headline in the usual news spot in the upper right. That space instead is taken up with a four-column picture of crowds in a city street and some people waving guns. Captioned “Syrians welcomed anti-government forces to Hama on Thursday, only days after the rebels took control of another large city, Aleppo.” The headline underneath that, in the right-hand column, but only a bit above the fold, “rebels in Syria storm key city. Quick advance on Hama stuns Al-Assad forces. Dateline, Istanbul. Syrian rebels stormed into the city of Hama on Thursday as government forces withdrew, bringing the rebels one step closer to the capital, Damascus, the seat of power of President Bashar al-Assad. The swift advance on Hama, one of Syria's largest cities, and the retreat of government forces were confirmed by both the rebels and the government. The advance came just days after the rebels extended their control over Aleppo, a major hub in northern Syria.”

After the jump, the Times explains, “the rebels behind the offensive are a combination of forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which evolved from an affiliate of al-Qaeda that was notorious early in the war for suicide attacks on government troops. The group says it has cut ties with the global terrorist organization, but it is still classified as a terrorist group by the United States and other countries. Other groups backed by Turkey and based in Syrian territory just south of the Turkish border have joined in the fight.”

On the other side of the front page is a two-column headline of the sort that usually announces the undisputed lead story in the paper. This one, one brisk stir of a teaspoon away from complete semantic dissolution. The words of the headline are, “Hegseth’s Work Troubles Feed Leadership Doubts.” 

Hegseth’s: possessive proper noun
work: verb or noun
troubles: noun or verb
feed: verb or noun
leadership: noun
doubts: noun, verb

It could mean that the WORK done by secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth is TROUBLING to a FEED of information that is DOUBTED by the LEADERSHIP of something or other but it seems to mean that Pete Hegseth's TROUBLES at WORK—work being used as an adjective in “work troubles” are FEEDing the DOUBTS assigned in classic Times fashion, to some unspecified and disembodied person or people, about Hegseth's leadership. 

Sub headline, “added heat for Trump defense pick over nonprofit missteps and alcohol use.” All of which is to say that the Times is chasing the New Yorker and NBC News in documenting accusations that Pete Hegseth was an incompetent administrator and a hopeless boozehound. “Mr. Hegseth,” the Times reports, “got so drunk at a wedding of a Fox News producer that he struggled to stand upright in a men's bathroom, according to two people with direct knowledge of the episode who declined to be named for fear of retribution. Friends asked the producer who was there to get Mr. Hegseth a ride home so he could make it to the set by 6 a.m., they said.” Then, substituting discourse about allegations for the allegations themselves, the Times writes, “Mr. Hegseth has also been battered by accounts in the press about his womanizing and infidelity, as well as a 2017 incident in which he was accused of rape at a speaking event in Monterey, California, though no charges were ever filed.” 

“Battered in the press by accounts,” or, you know, accused. After the jump is the news that Hegseth told Megyn Kelly on her Sirius XM show that he will stop drinking if he becomes Secretary of Defense, “This is the biggest deployment of my life and there won't be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I'm doing it," he said. Although the Times seems well enough sourced at Fox News to have gotten some more drunk stories about Hegseth’s time as a host there, it's still sucking the New Yorker's fumes on his performance as a nonprofit executive, which wins the magazine a reporting citation in the very last column of the story. “The New Yorker,” The Times writes, “reported that multiple ex-employees claimed in a seven-page whistleblower report that Mr. Hegseth had been drunk at a series of work-related events between 2013 and 2015. The Times has not reviewed that document.” 

In between Hegseth and Syria, on the front page, the headline is “Chasing Down Clues in Insurance Chief's Killing.” The story of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson in Midtown has now progressed to the point where the print edition of a newspaper is pretty much able to keep pace with the NYPD investigation. There is a little postage stamp photo of the alleged killer caught on camera at the front desk of the hostel two blocks from indignity morning podcast headquarters where he was apparently staying. The caption is “the New York City police released an image they said showed the face of the shooter.” The “they said” here can be extended to not just the police's assertion that the person in the photo is the person who did the shooting, but also the police's assertion that it shows his face, given that his hood is up and completely covers his forehead and everything down to his lower eyelids. After the jump is the three quarters view of the same person from the same camera captured according to CNN “while the desk clerk and he were flirting and she asked him to pull his mask down.” He's smiling exactly like that is the situation and looking more than a little like Jake Gyllenhaal, but his hood is still concealing his forehead and his temples, all of which seems to suggest at this point that what looks like a clear recognizable face to the human eye might not be so helpful an image to a facial recognition computing system, despite the privacy demolishing advancements made in that field. 

Alongside that on the jump, the headline is, “outpouring the vitriol is aimed at insurers.” Here the constraints of the headline format actually do the Times a favor. The online version of the piece was making the rounds yesterday because its headline was “torrent of hate for health insurance industry follows CEO's killing.” 

“Vitriol” seems like a much more accurate word. The print version of the story also does not include some of the smarmy judgmental language of the online version. That version of the story says “it is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson's work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose, but that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.” The print story just folds his family status into the sentence, “the dark commentary after the death of Mr. Thompson, a 50 year old insurance executive from Maple Grove, Minnesota, who was also a husband and a father of two children, highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America, where those with private insurance often find themselves in Kafkaesque tangles while seeking reimbursement for medical treatment and are often denied.” Judging by the Wayback Machine It looks as if the print version was published at noon And the disdain was edited into the story in an update four hours later.

That is the news Thank you for listening The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, sustain our podcasting work through your paid subscriptions and tips. So please do keep those coming. Have a safe and relaxing weekend. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again on Monday.