The paradox of news, as I define it: a story is newsworthy if it is new and different, yet the coverage of a story creates the impression that it is ordinary and normal. Coverage of a mass shooting or a terrorist attack, for example, can create the false impression that you are at serious risk of dying in either, even though they are newsworthy precisely because they are so rare. The CDC will give you a much better assessment of causes of death, and they are mundane things that don't get coverage because they are too common, like heart disease (still number 1!). So, people sit around eating junk food, worrying about mass shootings (the left's boogeyman) and terrorist attacks (the right's boogeyman), completely missing the point. The paradox of news in action. Or, inaction, as the case may be.
Did you catch that little story yesterday about Trump blaming the failure of Graham-Cassidy on Sen. Thad Cochrane being in the hospital? It was a kind of a blink-and-you-miss-it story, flitting across the news scene. Trump did a Fox & Friends appearance, asserting that Cochrane's hospitalization was the stumbling block preventing passage of Graham-Cassidy, but that the GOP really had the votes under reconciliation rules, which just expire before Monday. There are two problems with this. Cochrane is not in the hospital, and there are more than two no-votes, so his presence or absence from the floor is irrelevant. If his vote had mattered, the GOP would have wheeled him onto the floor in a wheelchair or a gurney to cast the deciding vote, IV in his arm, nurse physically moving his arm for him, with Bill Frist testifying that he is not in a persistent vegetative state (go look up "Terry Schiavo").
Does Trump know that Cochrane is just resting at home rather than in a hospital? Does he know that McConnell cancelled the vote because he couldn't get 50+Pence votes even with Cochrane? We... don't actually know. He lies so often that a lie is plausible, but he's also a clueless fuckin' idiot. This situation is what we call, in social science terms, "overdetermined."
With any even remotely normal president, the false assertion that a non-hospitalized Senator is hospitalized, and that a bill can pass with his vote even though the whip count clearly showed otherwise would be a major story. Instead, it was a brief amusement in yesterday's news, already off the major news pages. Go to the New York Times Politics page today, and look for it. I don't see it. Isn't the New York Times supposed to be the worst of the worst according to Trump and the GOP? Who else does Trump hate the most? CNN. Go to CNN's Politics page. As of this morning, no mention of it. Why isn't it there? The paradox of news. It isn't newsworthy when Trump says something wildly false. As of right now, Trump's PolitiFact scorecard has 15% "Pants on Fire" lies, 33% "False" statements, and another 21% "Mostly False" statements.
It is simply not news when the President says something ridiculously, idiotically false. It is hard for us to tell if he even knows what the truth is. And he does this so often that it has stopped being news, to the point that the news organizations that are supposedly most biased against him have trouble keeping up with this stuff. The Times and CNN aren't even talking about it today.
If we had a remotely normal president, this would be a major story. "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe." Forty years later, we still tell the story of this gaffe. A lie from Trump-- or maybe just a demonstration of gross ignorance-- can't hold a news cycle. They're just not newsworthy.
Meditate on that. With lots of deep breathing.
