Dear Weekend Jolter,
The media are in a convulsive state. Wouldn’t you say?
In the past two weeks:
• Fox News settled with Dominion for $787 million.
• BuzzFeed News shut down.
• Twitter’s blue-check system was effectively dismantled.
• NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell was ousted in connection with an “inappropriate relationship” with a woman in the company.
• Tucker Carlson and Fox News parted ways, and not amicably, it seems.
• CNN fired Don Lemon (*insert joke here about juice not being worth squeeze*).
• Vice Media Group announced layoffs and canceled its Vice News Tonight program.
A lot can happen in a fortnight. Jeff Blehar sums up the destruction neatly:
We’re going to look back on this brief seismic era in future decades the way we excavated the archaeological levels of Troy without knowing quite what happened, because age and sedimentary layers of later experience will have obscured our living context. We’ll only see the fire charring and the wreckage as we dig down and think, Ah, this was clearly a catastrophic terminal event. Something truly crazy must have happened here.
What to make of it all?
The first takeaway is that seven-year-old me’s inclination to go into paleontology was almost certainly the right one, and a calling he should have stuck with; if only time capsules could be shipped both ways. Stuck, instead, with an industry that resembles Fantasia’s visualization of The Rite of Spring — with its volcanoes and world-smashing and existential dread — my second takeaway is that we have no earthly idea what the media landscape is going to look like five, ten . . . heck, two years from now.
The industry headlines of the past two weeks mostly connect to discrete corporate crises — some legal and/or managerial in nature, others strictly financial — but the chaos coincides with broad and significant trends. Where they lead this business is anyone’s guess, but we can search for clues.
Jim Geraghty identified three lessons in the wake of the Fox News settlement. Among them: “It is unlikely that networks like Fox News can afford to keep loose-cannon hosts anymore.” That turned out to be prescient, if Jim may say so himself.
One can also detect a hint of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik plotline, as the media, or rather media-consuming habits, revert lately to a more primitive state. Semafor just ran a piece suggesting the heyday of social-media-generated news traffic is over, particularly given Facebook’s “sharp turn away from news.” Homepages are back, baby (may we suggest you bookmark this one), as are newsletters and blogging. What’s next? Tina Brown quipped in the piece, “Maybe as we continue to journey ever backwards, next stop is the revival of print.”
Funny, Ms. Brown. Somehow, that narrative arc seems too clean. But the future for media consumption ultimately will be determined by what readers trust. Right now, their outlook is a U2 chorus: They still haven’t found it. Gallup last fall showed just 34 percent of Americans trust the mass media to accurately and fairly report the news, with Republicans far more cynical than Democrats. Another survey found half of Americans think most national news organizations intend to “mislead, misinform, or persuade.” The same survey found people were not nearly so skeptical toward local news outfits.
Maybe there is room for more local news in the future; that would be good. Podcasts and newsletters seem to have a place. A new social-media platform could change the game. That’s not to mention (shudder) AI-generated content — the self-driving car of copy production — which can be professionally shunned for only so long. What will people trust? If readers and viewers are convinced every outlet is working an angle, then it makes sense that they’ll eventually gravitate toward specific voices whose assumptions they believe to be sound. I caught coffee with an old colleague last weekend, and our discussion of what we read was more often about whom. With faith in institutions shaken, the newsstand of brands could be supplanted by the algorithmically or self-curated roster of, forgive me — blue checks. As for Tucker, he could go the Rogan route, and become a brand unto himself. But as Jeff counsels, “rest assured, there will not be a Don Lemon media empire.”
It might be the one thing we can state with confidence — that, and the fact that an NRPLUS subscription is still a very good deal in these times. Anyway, please do read on.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Your move, Mr. President: McCarthy Puts Debt-Ceiling Ball in Biden’s Court
The polls are clear: America Doesn’t Want This Biden Reelection Bid
Predictable, and predicted: Afghanistan Comes Full Circle
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: No One Did This to Tucker Carlson
Michael Brendan Dougherty: In Defense of Tucker Carlson
Rich Lowry: Joe Biden Prepares His Next Basement Campaign
Caroline Downey: ‘I Immediately Experienced Regret’: British Man Recounts Horror of Gender-Transition Surgery
Stanley Kurtz: Poetry Recitation Returns
Dan McLaughlin: Donald Trump’s War on Reason and Reality
Dan McLaughlin: Can an Introvert Be President?
Wilfred Reilly: Why Woke Companies Deliberately Alienate Their Consumers
Brittany Bernstein: The Revealing Rise of Expelled Tennessee Lawmaker Justin Jones
Brittany Bernstein: San Francisco Ends Boycott of 30 States with Conservative Laws after Limitations Proved Ineffective, Costly
Carrie Lukas: Are Trans Women Now the Best Women?
Mark Paoletta: Justice Thomas Acted Properly and Was Not Required to Disclose His Trips
Ryan Mills: State Judge Blows a Hole in Leftist Case for Neglecting Homeless Camps, Open-Air Drug Markets
Thomas Berry & Isaiah McKinney: Stealing from the Poor and Giving to the Government?
CAPITAL MATTERS
Former Federal Housing Finance Agency director Mark Calabria weighs in on the latest FHFA policy: Biden’s New Mortgage Rule Is Based on a False Premise
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
You’ll have to read to find out what Brian Allen is teasing with this headline: An Astonishing Discovery about Vermeer
Armond White looks at what happens when scripted drama can’t out-crazy reality: White Noise’s Paranoia Is Irrelevant, Post-Covid
FROM THE NEW, MAY 15, 2023, ISSUE OF NR
Charles Fain Lehman: Why American Life Spans Are Getting Shorter
Philip Klein: Israel at 75
Dan McLaughlin: Don’t Expect a Dark-Horse Republican Nominee
Charles C. W. Cooke: Ron DeSantis’s Conservatism
STRAIGHT EXCERPTS, NO CHASER
Why are Americans dying at a younger age? NR’s new cover story from Charles Fain Lehman explores this question:
Americans aren’t living as long as we used to. A child born in 2021 can expect, on average, to live to the age of 76.1. That’s a decline of nearly a year from 2020, according to the CDC, and a nearly three-year decline from 2019. The last time life expectancy was this low was 1996.
Most of the world, of course, saw a sharp drop in life expectancy in 2020, largely because of the Covid pandemic. But while life expectancy rebounded in 2021 in most similarly developed countries, it continued to fall in the United States. In fact, Americans have lived less long on average than their developed-world peers for decades — at least since the 1980s, by some estimates.
This disparity has long enabled political posturing. Liberal critics of the United States, and particularly advocates of government-funded health care, point to the disparity as evidence of America’s basic failures in comparison with our more enlightened European peers. That the Republican-voting states of the Deep South have particularly low life expectancies is taken by some as evidence of the particular deadliness of conservative policies.
But that’s not the full story. While America’s stagnating life expectancy is a real cause for concern, in the long run our underperformance has had more to do with the risky behaviors of America’s young adults than with our less socialized health-care system. And while policy can reduce those behaviors, there’s no silver bullet for making Americans live longer.
From NR’s editorial on Biden’s reelection bid, the one we were assured was “virtually inconceivable”:
Already the oldest man ever to hold the office, he would be 82 when sworn in for a second term and would be 86 when it ends. His slowed speech, shuffling gait, and leisurely schedule all suggest a man worse for age. A serious health crisis — actuarially increasingly likely — would throw the nation into a crisis of governance, and perhaps of untested provisions of the Constitution. It would also elevate Harris.
Biden’s record when in full control of his faculties is bad enough. He has been a feckless commander-in-chief, disastrously abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban and signaling to Vladimir Putin that NATO might tolerate a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. His administration has prioritized chimerical climate negotiations over the hard work of alliance-building against the China-Russia-Iran axis, and needlessly alienated allies such as Saudi Arabia while badly neglecting American sovereignty at our southern border.
The most shameful aspect of Biden’s presidency has been his flagrant and repeated contempt for the constitutional limits of his office. Time and again, in unilaterally decreeing sweeping legislative policies such as student-loan forgiveness, an eviction moratorium, and a national vaccine mandate, Biden has acted as if the president is a national lawgiver with general police powers. A man who has been in Washington for half a century, most of it in the Senate, has no excuse for this. He has exacerbated lawlessness with scorn for norms of behavior (such as questioning the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections in advance) and evident partiality in the enforcement of law.
Biden’s profligacy with federal spending exacerbated the runaway inflation of his first term, which has yet to be fully tamed. Elsewhere, he has simply abdicated leadership to his party’s radicals on a host of cultural and economic issues from women’s sports to gas stoves to domestic energy production to mishandling of the nation’s transport infrastructure. The Democrats are laundering their policy radicalism through an aged figurehead.
The voters answering the polls are right: America doesn’t need, or want in the abstract, four more years of Joe Biden.
Caroline Downey has kicked off a series about those who have “detransitioned” following gender-related medical interventions. Her story of a British man now planning legal action is eye-opening:
In 2018, [Ritchie] Herron had a vaginoplasty, in which the penis is inverted to create an artificial vagina.
“I immediately experienced regret,” he said, and expressed this to the gender therapist three months after the procedure.
National Review has reviewed medical documents confirming that Herron did in fact undergo genital reconstructive surgery in addition to other interventions such as voice therapy, facial hair removal, and hormone injections.
But the therapist assured him he was merely experiencing rumination, not regret, from the general anesthetic, which can sometimes exacerbate OCD. The therapist referred him to an OCD psychologist, who told Herron he also had unstable personality disorder.
Then, after nearly 300 visits in five years, Herron was discharged from the gender clinic, left with a mutilated body and extreme physical and emotional anguish. The clinic did not respond to a request for comment.
Herron comes forward at a pivotal time in the debate over how best to treat gender dysphoria, especially in young people. A divide has emerged between several European countries, which are opting for a more skeptical approach to medical interventions, and the U.S., which is in thrall to the so-called “affirmation” approach that sees any hesitation to prescribe puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and ultimately surgery as a cruel denial of the transgender individual’s autonomy.
Herron’s home country recently shuttered the Tavistock Clinic after an independent review revealed that children seeking treatment at the clinic were prematurely guided toward medical intervention, leading to serious adverse consequences later in life.
None of Herron’s friends who surgically transitioned warned him about the negative complications, he said. Later, Herron learned one of them had suffered bleeding, prolapse, and rectovaginal fistula, in which an abnormal hole develops between the rectum and the vagina that can result in the passage of stool through the tract.
Many of them also lost sensation, Herron discovered, long after it was too late. One friend of his who had surgery six months before Herron had “no pain, no pleasure, was just numb completely,” he said.
One last item. This San Francisco update, from Brittany Bernstein, is just too perfect:
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to end a boycott of 30 states that passed conservatives laws after the rule proved costly and ineffective.
The board voted 7-4 to repeal a 2016 law that prohibited city employees from traveling to or doing business with companies in states that passed conservative laws. The board of supervisors first enacted the law in an effort to punish states that had enacted what it viewed as restrictions on LGBT rights after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Since 2015, the board had amended the law to include states that, in its view, had limited voting rights and abortion access.
“It’s not achieving the goal we want to achieve,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, the sponsor of the legislation to repeal the boycott. “It is making our government less efficient.”
The rollback comes after a report by the city administrator’s office found that no states ever appeared to change their own laws in response to the city’s boycott. A budget and legislative analyst’s report also found the city had done business with the states on the boycott list. A one-year period between mid-2021 and mid-2022 saw waivers for contracts and purchase orders totaling $791 million. Meanwhile, the budget and legislative analyst also found that the city had spent nearly $475,000 in staffing expenses to carry out the boycott.
Shout-Outs
Matthew Continetti, at Commentary: TikTok’s Useful Idiots
Chris Stirewalt, at the Dispatch: The Politics of Very Happy People
Billy Binion, at Reason: She Had $2,300 in Unpaid Taxes. The County Bilked Her for $25,000.
CODA
Massive Attack is a group I know next to nothing about, except for this one song that you, too, might know even if you don’t recognize the name — its list of film, TV, commercial, and video-game credits is, like the band itself, “massive.”
I refer to “Angel,” whose all-powerful bass line cannot be resisted.
A final programming note: I’ll be away next week, handing full operational control of this dispatch to Jack Crowe, NR’s top newsman, who will set aside his fedora and smoking pipe for precisely the amount of time it takes to compose the newsletter.
Have a great weekend.