We begin today with John Cassidy of The New Yorker, laying out arguments for President Joe Biden’s reelection.
Biden’s calling card, the one that identifies himself as a Trump-slayer, and an upholder of normality and sanity, remains his biggest advantage going into 2024. He does have others, though. Inside the Democratic Party, he has proved an adroit coalition builder. Much as he’s an old-school, Irish-American politician and many of his closest political advisers are veteran, white operatives who hail from the moderate wing of the Party, he nevertheless recognized long ago that his party’s center of gravity has shifted, and his Administration has sought to bring on board Democrats who are younger, more diverse, and progressive. This approach is already evident in preparations for the 2024 campaign. On Tuesday, Biden also announced that Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a White House official who is the granddaughter of the labor leader Cesar Chavez, will be his campaign manager, and Quentin Fulks, a thirty-three-year-old Black political strategist, who managed Raphael Warnock’s Senate campaign in Georgia, will serve as principal deputy campaign manager.
Though Biden didn’t dwell on the details of his policy record in his launch video, he has some substantial achievements to highlight. Under his leadership, the U.S. economy rebounded more quickly from the
coronavirus pandemic than many of its competitors, and the unemployment rate is just 3.5 per cent. In the past year, Congress has enacted historic investments in green energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductor-chip manufacturing. As I
pointed out last week, these initiatives are already paying off in announcements to build new factories and create new jobs, many of them in purple and red states.
Ian Prasad Philbrick of The New York Times thinks that Biden’s age may not matter all that much to the 2024 electorate.
Americans often express concern about aging leaders, but that hasn’t stopped them from voting for older candidates.
In a recent USA Today/Suffolk University survey, half of Americans said that the ideal age for a president was between 51 and 65. Another quarter said they preferred candidates to be 50 or younger. But five of the last eight presidential nominees, including Mr. Biden in 2020 and Donald J. Trump (twice), have been well over 65. In several cases, voters chose them over much younger primary opponents. And dozens of senators or representatives over 80 have been elected in the past century.
Concerns over age are also more nuanced than they may first appear. While most voters favor age limits for politicians, they disagree over what that limit should be. Many voters also say older lawmakers bring valuable experience and shouldn’t be barred from serving if they remain in good health.
That doesn’t mean Americans who say they’re concerned about age are lying. Their voting choices may reflect the available options. “There’s nothing inconsistent about people saying no one in their 80s should be president and then voting for someone in their 80s if that’s the only choice they’re given,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
Lindsey McPherson of Roll Call reports about the House passage of the debt limit bill, which threatens the economic health of the country.
Republicans said the measure reflects the shared priorities of various ideological factions in the conference and serves as their opening offer to President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats, who want a clean debt limit increase.
“The whole purpose of this is to compel the president to negotiate — and to demonstrate to Washington, D.C., that Kevin McCarthy has the votes to raise the debt ceiling,” Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., said.
House Democrats all voted against the bill, arguing that Congress should raise the debt limit without conditions. They also slammed the spending cuts in the bill, saying they would have a massive impact on government programs Americans depend on, from health care and nutrition services to education and infrastructure.
“There is no way Congress will agree to 10 years of destructive caps and the biggest single cut to nondefense programs in American history," House Budget ranking member Brendan F. Boyle, D-Pa., said during debate.
Brian Stelter writes for The New York Times that, if anything, it is the cable news networks that are in control and not the network’s particular media celebrities.
The Friday episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that turned out to be his last drew only about 2.6 million viewers — a measly 1 percent of the American adult population. But on Monday, the news of his firing was one of the top stories in the country. That’s because the power of cable news is in its reach and repetition, not its ratings.
I learned this during my nearly nine years at CNN, where I anchored a weekly program about the media and reported on Mr. Carlson’s radicalization. The people who tuned in to his show at 8 o’clock sharp were only a subset of his total audience. When you count all the people who saw him on a TV at a bar or in an airport and all the people who watched a clip on the internet or heard radio talk-show hosts quote him, he had a monthly audience of surely tens of millions.
Now multiply that reach by the dozens of other hosts on Fox News, and you can start to see the true influence of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Nielsen has a little-known metric for this, called cumulative viewership, and according to that measure, Fox News attracted more than 63 million viewers during the first three months of this year. Fox execs have pooh-poohed the cume data point, perhaps because the figure is bigger for CNN, closer to 68 million for the first quarter. But these metrics don’t fully account for the full digital reach of stars like Carlson and Lemon, either.
Brian Steinberg of Variety thinks that, with the firing of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon, the networks may have reached a point where they would like to rely less on “provocateurs” and “pot-stirrers.”
Within the space of 90 minutes on April 24, Carlson was ousted from Fox News Channel and Lemon was pushed from CNN. Both were stalwart personalities for their networks. Both were valued for their ability to spark conversation, debate, pushback and even furor. For years, that has been the cable-news coin of the realm. As the economics of TV shift, however, it is becoming clearer that media executives may have less patience for TV-news pot-stirrers.
“Cable news is now sort of seen as a place where people can put opinion and talk and controversial figures who can say anything on air. That is something that has come back to bite them,” says Ben Bogardus, an associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University. Media companies may start to see controversial hosts “as hurting their brand, hurting their image, hurting their abilities as a news organization,” and say, “We need to dial back on this.”
Carlson and Lemon would seem to have little in common. Carlson has taken potshots at the Black Lives Matter movement. Lemon once called former President Donald Trump a racist. In fact, both have played the role of primetime provocateur for their respective outlets. At a time when big live audiences are harder to generate — more people are gravitating toward bespoke streaming binge sessions — media companies that own news outlets, their main source of live programming, can’t afford to alienate anyone.
To be sure, Fox News and CNN had specific reasons for parting ways with anchors who have, for the past several years, been essential parts of their brand.
Georgia Tech professor Susana Morris writes for MSNBC about the complicated relationship of Don Lemon and his Black audience.
Up until last year, there was a reason Lemon meant a lot to cable TV viewers and to Black viewers in particular. Lemon didn’t just bring the news. He also brought personality. Viral clips of him abound. A particularly hilarious one captures him bursting into laughter with guests Marc Lamont Hill and Angela Rye, much to the chagrin of stony-faced conservative pundit Paris Dennard, after Dennard suggested that a Black man wearing a red MAGA cap to The Cheesecake Factory “shouldn’t be verbally accosted.” And who can forget Lemon’s annual appearances at CNN’s New Year’s Eve celebration? Whether he was drunkenly recounting the state of his romantic life or getting his ears pierced on live television, Lemon was always must-see TV.
This now-tarnished legacy was hard fought. Lemon was not afraid to connect to the news he reported. For example, when he revealed his own experiences with colorism growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he added texture to a news story about the insidious nature of internalized racism. Lemon tackled controversial topics head-on. In January 2018, then-President Donald Trump referred to African countries, Haiti and El Salvador as “s---hole countries.” Lemon, unlike other journalists who used equivocating language, said: “This is ‘CNN Tonight,’ I’m Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist. A lot of us already knew that.”
Lemon could be a contrarian at times. During President Barack Obama’s administration, he developed a reputation for sharply questioning guests and pundits who came to advocate for the nation’s first Black president. In some ways, this pivot from his previous, more congenial persona, was not always welcomed and was even viewed as opportunistic. But Lemon’s transition to a more hard-hitting interviewer who challenged guests from both sides of the aisle stood out, especially in a media landscape where partisan commentary is increasingly the norm. During the Trump years, Lemon pivoted once again, becoming bold in his criticism of racism. His response to Trump’s racist remarks on Black and Latino countries was an example of that change.
It’s ironic that one of cable TV’s most reliable voices against racism was let go the same day as one of cable TV’s most reliable voices in support of racism.
Many Black viewers of cable news (especially older people like my mom and aunt) prefer to watch MSNBC rather than CNN, but would flip over to Don Lemon quite a bit. And while they appreciated Lemon’s truth-telling commentary during the Trump presidency, they did not forget about some of Lemon’s more problematic shows and views. FWIW, it seems that Don Lemon’s Black audiences aren’t surprised about his ouster, assumed that it was going to happen sooner or later for fairly good reasons—and especially after Lemon’s incendiary Nikki Haley comments. But Black audiences are angry that it is the exchange with 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that seems to have triggered his ouster.
Lemon’s most hilarious moment is undoubtedly the iconic and giggly “Black History” moment with Symone Sanders.
Kelsey Ables of The Washington Post reports on highly disturbing evidence that the so-called “Discord leaker,” Jack Teixeira, was a mass murderer waiting to happen.
New evidence filed in Massachusetts District Court suggests Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member suspected of leaking a trove of classified military intelligence, had a history of making violent comments, sought information about how to commit a shooting and had what prosecutors called a “virtual arsenal of weapons” stored at his places of residence, including an AK-style weapon.
In the court filing, prosecutors also accuse Teixeira of obstructing the investigation into the leaks by attempting to destroy evidence. The filing is intended to support the prosecutors’ request that Teixeira remain in custody without a bond, which a judge is expected to decide on Thursday.
[...]
In the court documents, prosecutors reveal that Teixeira was suspended from high school in 2018 after a classmate overheard him talking about “Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.” On social media in recent years, he has continued such rhetoric, prosecutors say, writing in a November message that he wanted to kill a “ton of people” because it would be “culling the weak minded.” In February, he asked a user for advice about what kind of rifle would fire best from an SUV, saying he wanted to commit a shooting in a “crowded urban or suburban environment.”
David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times looks at the blame game regarding COVID-19.
It was China’s fault, or Donald Trump’s, or the spring breakers in Daytona Beach or those selfish enough to travel home for Thanksgiving. It was those who forced essential workers to stay on the job and those who kept ordering delivery from them. It was the people who socialized in “pods” and those who weren’t strict enough about them. It was the Sturgis motorcycle rally in 2020. It was those who cut the line to get vaccinated, then those who didn’t get vaccinated, then those who stopped wearing masks once they did. It was conservatives who called Covid a disease of the elderly, and it was liberals who called it a terrifying, society-ordering risk. It was the governors who reopened and those who didn’t, and those who insisted that Omicron was mild and those who insisted it wasn’t. It was the teachers unions. It was the kid who infected the whole fourth grade. It was the parents who didn’t feel safe reopening classrooms at all. It was the people who didn’t bother to install air-filtration systems despite billions in federal funding and those who didn’t stage randomized control trials to measure the actual threat of transmission in schools. It was people who didn’t talk enough about long Covid and people who never talked about anything else. It was those undermining the vaccines and then those overlooking their shortcomings. It was mask holdouts, once we could no longer complain about mask mandates. It was the unvaccinated and it was Joe Biden saying “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” It was the C.D.C. revising its thresholds for local spread, then telling you it was safe to return to work after five days even without a negative test. And it was those people who kept annoyingly insisting that the pandemic wasn’t over, when, in truth, well, it both was and wasn’t.
It was the virus, in the end, in ways hardly any of us were comfortable acknowledging. And so many, instead, pointed fingers at one another, whether we wanted more done or less. Perhaps out of a desperate need to believe that it was actually possible to defeat Covid-19, we chose to tell morality tales about pandemic response.
After studying the history of pandemics and the public reactions to them, I came to the conclusion that other than Donald Trump’s depraved indifference to national suffering, there was little or nothing about the varied public reactions to COVID-19 that surprised me. I think that the range of people’s reactions to the pandemic could be and should have been expected, even the “morality tales.”
Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global reports that the Texas Legislature is considering two bills that would allow chaplains to be hired as school counselors without the required certifications.
The Texas Legislature is considering House Bill 3614 and Senate Bill 763, which would allow Texas schools to hire chaplains to perform the work of school counselors but without any required certification, training or experience.
[...]
The House bill’s sponsor is Rep. Cole Hefner of Mount Pleasant, Texas. Hefner, the father of seven children, is a member of South Jefferson Baptist Church in Lindale. The Senate bill’s sponsor is Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston, a proponent of taxpayer-funded vouchers for private Christian schools. Both legislators are conservative Republicans.
The exact language of the bill states: “A school district may employ a chaplain instead of a school counselor to perform the duties required of a school counselor under this title. A chaplain employed under this subsection is not required to be certified by the State Board for Educator Certification.”
Currently, Texas law requires school counselors to pass a school counselor certification exam, to hold at least a 48-hour master’s degree in counseling from an accredited institution of higher education, and to have two creditable years of teaching experience as a classroom teacher.
Just … wow!
Peter Beaumont, Emma Graham-Harrison, and Amy Hawkins of The Guardian report that after a phone call between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a Chinese peace delegation will be sent to Kyiv.
According to Chinese state media, Xi made the offer during a telephone call on Wednesday with Zelenskiy and offered to help facilitate peace talks aimed at achieving a ceasefire as soon as possible.
Xi also appeared to pledge
China would remain neutral in the conflict, saying Beijing “will neither watch the fire from the other side, nor add fuel to the fire, let alone take advantage of the crisis to profit”, according to CCTV.
Zelenskiy described the phone call, said by aides to be almost an hour, as “long and meaningful” and said the two had discussed “possible cooperation to reach a fair and sustainable peace”.
But he insisted Ukraine would not give up on lost territory: “There can be no peace at the expense of territorial compromises. The territorial integrity of Ukraine must be restored within the 1991 borders,” he said in readout of the call on Telegram.
Finally today,
Stefan Boscia of POLITICO Europe says that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will arrive on the final leg of his trade tour in the United Kingdom and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is all in on DeSatan.
The U.K. will be the final stop on DeSantis’ four-country trade mission, following visits to Japan, South Korea and Israel.
A DeSantis spokesperson said the trip would “build on economic relationships Florida has with each country,” but it is being seen by media pundits as a way for the governor to look presidential on the global stage.
He is set to meet with Badenoch and then Cleverly tomorrow in separate bilateral meetings.
DeSantis will also attend a business roundtable with Badenoch, a rising star in her own party and the bookmakers’ favorite to become next Conservative leader, being organized by the BritishAmericanBusiness lobby group.
A DeSantis spokesperson said the trip would “build on economic relationships Florida has with each country,” but it is being seen by media pundits as a way for the governor to look presidential on the global stage.
Have the best possible day, everyone!