The Dispatch Podcast - Biden Abroad, Trump at Home

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio was should have been a moment for the Biden administration to publicly transcend politics. Sarah, David, and Declan wonder why this chance was frittered. Plus: between a new DeSantis bill and the Dominion lawsuit, what should we think about the state of defamation law? Show Notes: -Train crew had little warning before Ohio wreck, probe finds -‘Incredibly damning:’ Fox News documents stun some legal experts -Meet the Woke Activists behind the Roald Dahl Book Purge -Donald Trump visits flood-ravaged Louisiana (David's mention) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts at secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined by Declan Garvey and David Drucker.

We're going to tick through a lot of topics today. We're going to start with the train derailment in East Palestine and the political fallout. The Biden administration and the political opportunity, potentially, for former President Donald Trump, as well as President Biden's trip to Ukraine. Then we will talk a bit about the Fox News. versus Dominion lawsuit that has been getting so much attention of late. We'll do some 24 and we'll end with a not worth your time about editing books. Let's dive right in. So Declan, this trial. So Declan, this train derailed now three weeks ago. Today, which is Thursday,

um, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg visited. The administration has been getting a lot of criticism from the right at least about not taking this more seriously, not putting it sort of at the fore. And specifically, the attacks have been focused a lot on transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, um, and sort of the increasing list of things that folks are saying that he hasn't particularly handled well as transportation secretary. The FAA computers going down is sort of the key example. But, Declan, is this politics or is this an actual problem?

It's both. I think it's both. And I think that the political ramifications are played up because Pete Buttigieg is widely seen as somebody who has aspirations for office, whether that be Senate moving to where he moved his family to Michigan earlier in his term or running for president. Again, he's in his, I believe, late 30s or early 40s, long political career ahead of them. Typically, the Department of Transportation Secretary is not a political lightning rod. When administrations used to put somebody from the opposite party in their cabinet, that was usually a place where they could slot somebody in that said. I mean, obviously this is a

very important subject train derailments are down from where they were decades ago. But the ramifications for this community in eastern Ohio are huge. And I mean, the pictures are enough to cause anybody to have legitimate concerns. I know administration officials have been going to the town in recent days, drinking the water, trying to express confidence in their testing that shows that the water is safe to drink, that the air is safe to breathe. But I totally understand why people in this community have concerns, especially when you see, you know, people were saying very similar things about Flint, Michigan for years. And it turns out to have been a bunch of BS. The administration has, after a pretty lengthy delay,

released a list of kind of laundry list of demands of how we can be better about preventing this kind of thing in the future. Some of it has to do with the specifics of what happened in East Palestine, some of it does not. We're expected to get a updated report from the National Train Safety Board later today, which will have more details on what actually caused this derayment. The initial assessment was a wheel-bearing, overheating, causing the train to derail. So some of the back and forth about automated braking systems and the number of crew members on a specific train, it's becoming a lot of, you know, other other fights being thrust into this specific derailment that may or may not have played a role

here specifically. David, you know, in this Politico piece titled Buttigieg World Frustrated at GOP attacks over train wrecks, they're citing three people in Buttigieg's orbit, quote, admit to being exasperated by the furor saying nobody asked him about the derailment in any of the 23 media interviews he conducted during the first 10 days after the accident. Then critics lambasted him for not speaking sooner. Is that fair? Well, I don't think it's fair, but, you know, nothing's fair in love and politics. And if you sign up for this gig, then you have to expect to take the heat whether you deserve it or not. What I find interesting about Secretary Buttigieg, and let's back

up for a minute, to Declan's point, this particular cabinet position usually doesn't matter. Nobody knows who this person is. Nobody cares who this person is. Whatever they do doesn't seem to affect anybody's life as far as they can tell. Normanetta, Transportation Secretary during 9-11 being a glaring example of the opposite, he did matter. That was a major crisis that involved the nation's transportation systems among other things. I would just like to state as someone who's like one of my first jobs out of college was working at the FAA and both of you have offended me terribly. You know, I once told a very prominent television anchor that his brother who had served as housing secretary, we were talking about Ben Carson getting the gig under Trump.

And I said, listen, what can go wrong? That position doesn't really matter. And then I'm like, oh, I shouldn't have said it that way. Maybe he didn't like his brother. You never know. Yeah, the point I'm trying to get to is that here you have a politician with presidential aspirations. And he's handed crisis after crisis related to his job on which he can distinguish himself. You have a supply chain crisis. You have the recent dust up with the airlines over the holidays with all of those cancellations and all of that.

And you have this. And the computer systems going down. Yeah. And you know, the old thing about, you know, God's sending, God tells the guy, I sent you a rowboat, I sent you a helicopter, and you just kept saying no. I mean, here he could use this usually forgotten, useless position that kills presidential aspirations to further them to show his executive leadership, his performance in a crisis, not to mention just being on TV and all over the media, and he squanders it.

So is everything necessarily his fault? Maybe not, but who cares? Is it the president's fault? No. Is it the last president's fault? No. this is what happens when you ask the American people or the people that the American people have put in power

to put you in power. You get to handle and be blamed for all the crises, so you make of it what you will. I'm very surprised, given how the administration, this administration has handled a bunch of natural disasters so far that they didn't have somebody out there right away, that they didn't have a Biden trip, at least on the books right away, he wasn't coming for a few weeks, that they didn't immediately make a show of doing everything

I can to help everybody. I just actually really don't understand it. There's a number of things that the president has to deal with, that his administration has to deal with, not just this, but it was a total gimme. Buttigieg, from a political standpoint, has totally blown an opportunity to distinguish himself. And, you know, for a president that we at least think is running for reelection, not that he's going to win, you know, Ohio's electoral votes anytime soon because of the nature of the map these days. But it's just the kind of thing you're usually on top of. This is what's so strange to me. Fine. Supply chain issues, there's not a lot you can do publicly aside from, say, we're working on it and try to get it fixed, or on the rail

strike, or on, as you mentioned, the sort of Christmas scheduling meltdowns, or even on the FAA's computer failures that grounded flights for a long time. But this was such an easy one to show up for. It was in sort of his wheelhouse. He loves talking about the environment and this is, you know, sort of a young person's game and to wait three weeks to go. As you say, it was an odd missed opportunity. And I want to pivot to then the political opportunity it's given former President Trump. And I guess what I'm concerned about of why Joe Biden still has, we have no scheduled trips for the president himself or the vice president, why it took three weeks for the transportation, secretary to go and then sort of be on the defense, talk about how like, it's not really important

for me to be here because, you know, this is all taking care of. The emergencies over. I'm here because Fox News made me, basically. Declan, should I be cynical about the fact that 72% of the people in this district voted for President Trump in 2020? And that that's why the administration hasn't focused on this? Because, and not just because they don't think there's votes there, although That's one, I think, again, cynical way to interpret it, but because they're concerned that if President Biden shows up, it just won't be a very good political moment for him. I mean, the opposite was certainly leveled against Trump during his four years in office in that he either withheld or wasn't as quickly forthcoming with aid in places that he was not

politically inclined to be favorable towards. So the EPA was out there relatively quickly, quietly. And I agree with you that I think the administration could have and should have been more forthcoming about what they were doing. And they were slow on the public relations response to this. 72% voting for Trump is huge. I mean, that is one of the reddest districts then in the country. This isn't like a, you know, oh, it leans red. I mean, as David was saying, Biden's not going to win Ohio. Pete Buttigieg isn't going to win Ohio. Right. It's hard to, it's hard to say that that did not play into it in some way, shape, or form. If this had happened in Michigan, would Pete Buttigieg have waited three weeks?

You know, future Senator Pete Buttigieg, I don't think so. The funny thing is, though, Biden rushed off to Kentucky after a natural disaster there. There was a massive tornado that ripped through Kentucky, and particularly rural Kentucky, if memory serves. And President Biden made a point of getting there pretty quickly. And I remember the stories surrounding his visit being about the fact that probably a good 75 to 100% of the voters who lived in this area, in these areas, not only didn't vote for him, but were probably hostile to him. And so the administration was aware of it. The stories reflected it.

I think there were specific stories about the fact that, hey, he's going to go there and comfort people that hate his. guts. And of course, they interviewed people and people were not, people were much more appreciative of his visit. We're glad the president is coming. I may not have voted for him, but it's important that he's here and I appreciate it. So just not to impugn people. But my point is, if the thinking about East Palestine was those people don't like us anyway, it doesn't match up with how this administration, this White House, has treated other natural disasters that have happened in regions of the country where it's clear most people don't like the president. That's a great counter example, actually. I think that's meaningful.

I wonder if part of this is an issue with the timing of the media coverage here in that it took several days for this story to break through on a national level. And when it did, it broke through on the conservative side with Fox News kind of playing it up and focusing on it. And there's kind of a phenomenon that happens with the media on top. both sides here where if Fox News tries to make something a big deal, a lot of mainstream outlets will do the opposite and be like, oh, that's just Fox News playing things up for political purposes. And the opposite happens when MSNBC or something makes a big deal out of something that Trump does. And I wonder if that was kind of the initial reaction where, okay, this is

something that Fox is trying to use to attack us. We don't want to react too forcefully, too quickly to let them drive the narrative on this. We, you know, maybe it's not as big of a deal as they're making it out to be. And I wonder if that played a role in their delay to get out there. I want to pivot over to Donald Trump's visit. You know, Donald Trump, David, beats anyone from the Biden administration obviously getting there. I'm talking about, you know, top level political appointees, as we've said. EPA, FEMA have all been there now for several weeks. This is one of his truly like first major campaign events in a lot of ways. He was well received. As I said, and maybe because of the fact that it's a plus 72 Trump district, at one point at a car dealership

in town where bottled water was being distributed, a photo of Trump leaned against a barricade reading, a hero will rise, signs and flags around the village broadcast support both for Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. That's sort of a fun little side piece. This is all coming from the Associated Press. David, is this Trump's moment? Is this sort of the roadmap, if you will, for his campaign moving forward, the sort of forgotten man,

this administration doesn't care about you, these are the people I fought for. What great are you giving this event? Well, it's a gimmie, and I credit the former president with recognizing a gimmie and going, particularly because he was able to beat the current president to the pun.

And so he was able to look presidential and, you know, remind voters in the Midwest what they might have liked about him. But I think that we have to put this in context. This is something that Trump has done before as a candidate for president in 2016. I remember that in order to show that he had compassion and cared about people, his campaign sent him down to Louisiana after a hurricane there. and we famously saw Trump, you know, throwing paper towels out of a truck and water bottles and a whole bunch of things, like he was on the supply chain line, getting goods to people in need. And so he's in a sense, he's reprising the hits here.

But it's something that he should have absolutely done. I think it doesn't necessarily do for him what the visit to Louisiana did for him in the 2016 campaign. He still has issues with suburban voters. He still has issues with female voters. He still has issues with the fact that his schick has grown exhausting for many people eight years on. He still can win the nomination. He still could win the presidency. But I don't think this is the kind of aha moment in a Trump campaign that it sort of was in a way in 2016 when so many people just needed one sign, just one piece of evidence that it was okay to. take a chance on him.

This is really a, if you want to reverse engineer it, if you're Joe Biden and you want to make inroads or hold on to the inroads you might have made with Trump voters in 2020, of which they did, he still got clobbered in many areas, but if you look at the percentages, he was able to improve on Hillary Clinton's performance, you don't want to give ground. And to the extent that you have voters in ex-urban communities and rural communities that didn't vote for Trump in 60, in 20, but are, you know, are reevaluating their choices for 2024. Why give an inch when you're already, even though you're not an announced candidate, Joe Biden, you're already in the midst of a presidential cycle, whether you like it or not?

Declan, President Biden went to a surprise trip to Kiev to Ukraine this week. And the juxtaposition was kind of meaningful, I thought. On the one hand, I think there's plenty of reasons to think it's pretty important for the president of United States to go to Ukraine. That is a major world event that is ongoing. As compared to what a president can do in East Palestine, not actually much. Let's be clear. And at the same time, it feels like the juxtaposition fit this political narrative of the moment, particularly of criticisms from the right, this idea that we're doing too much for Ukraine and too little for the forgotten man in the United States. And it was just this ready-made side-by-side picture. I was joking with someone else at the dispatch on Monday. You know, we can predict Tucker Carlson's monologue for tonight before he gives it. We could have written it and sent it to him and it would have been what he read. You know, Biden cares more about his pals in Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, than he does these white people in eastern Ohio. You did have the mayor of this town of East

Palestine on Fox this week calling that trip a slap in the face that Biden chose to go there first and that Biden announced, I think, half a billion dollars in additional aid. This has obviously already been appropriated for Ukraine, but I don't think it should be considered in either or. It should be an and, But I totally understand why those people might be frustrated. That being said, this is the one-year anniversary of the war. This trip obviously was months in the works. You're not going to call it off. But it feels like he would have called it off, right?

Like, you said you wouldn't call it off for something here. Yes, you would. For a big enough thing. And I think the problem is the people of East Palestine, people of Ohio, people on the right think this was a big enough thing. And the administration didn't think it was a big enough thing. And that's wherein the problem lies. Yes, yes.

And I guess, I mean, their defense will be something along the lines of, look, in presidential visits, they tend to not actually, as you were saying, do much to help the problem. They actually take resources away because you have to spend all this time and energy securing the location and clearing the way for things and all these photo ops. And you bring all this media that gets in the way of recovery efforts and all that. That's typically why you see presidents, even when they are moving quickly, take a couple days to get to these scenes. But you're right. If they considered this a big enough deal, they would have made something work or sent Buttigieg or sent somebody else or Kamala Harris to go in Biden's stead. I think the vote of confidence that a presidential visit would give is worth it. And I think we'll see Biden go there at some point in the next couple weeks, even if it's just to head off some of this political pressure.

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X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 by week. at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. All right. David Drucker, I want to talk about this Fox News lawsuit. Before I do, I want to provide the disclosure that my husband is a lawyer involved in the case. So, and it's also worth disclosing that because he's a lawyer involved in the case, I actually know very very, very little about this case. So instead of you getting more information because he's involved in the case, you're actually going to get less. Anyway, worth saying all of that. But

obviously the filing from Dominion got a lot of attention in the last week and all of these emails and tax and everything between, you know, household names, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and all of these folks. At the same time, what was sort of interesting to me is that the case itself wasn't getting a lot of attention. I want us to maybe divide those two up because there's been plenty of conversation over what this means for Fox News or the state of journalism. And I want us to talk about that. Then I also want to spend a little bit of time on the First Amendment and what it means in journalism in these defamation lawsuits and how that works. But let's start with the Fox News piece. David? Yeah, well, you know, none of us work for free because it's not the world we

live in. And so any media outlet has to take into account its readers and its customer base and how it's going to serve up information in a way that generates cash. What I will say is to me, I think this just was another reminder in how much, and at least in the case of media where conservative commentators are the star of the show, how much the audience is wagging the dog versus the other way around. So much of what we talk about, particularly when we focus on the Republican Party, but, you know, we could have these conversations about the left as well, but keeping it siloed for a minute. We always talk about conservative media writ large and how some of it makes people angry and gets people focused on issues that they otherwise wouldn't be

focused on and how that impacts our politics. But if you really look at the growth of conservative media over the last 20, 30, 40 years, we've really reached a point where it's so often the media outlets and the star of any show that are reactive to what they believe their audience wants or knows their audience wants. And so much of the concern is about that, right? So we look at all these internal emails that were released because of this lawsuit. And you can see that the prime time stars at Fox News had the same opinion of the outcome of the 2020 election as Joe Biden and a whole host of us who have covered this issue and found that whatever fraud may have occurred, it in no way reached the level of having any impact on the outcome of the election.

This was the assessment of Bill Barr, U.S. Attorney General under Donald Trump. This was, as we've just found out, the assessment of Mark Bernovich, Arizona's, attorney general who looked into this. Everywhere we've gone, every court we've been in, every study that's been conducted, every audit that's been initiated that was supposed to prove once and for all that President Trump should be reinstated as the current president, never mind that it's not possible to do. And we keep ending up in the same place. Joe Biden won the election and Donald Trump lost. And Fox's prime time stars knew that. But they were very, very aware of where their audience was and that their audience was digesting the information very differently than they

were and that it was important for them to be aware and deferential to their audience. And so I think that's really what I think this tells us. A lot of people will use this to take shots at Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson and that's all fine. I just don't think that that's interesting because they're taking shots of those people anyway. I think this shows us that it's the audience that leads the media often, more often than the media leading the audience. Declan, is this, what's interesting to me is we're getting all of these internal emails and communications from Fox News. I'm curious what that would look like at MSNBC or CNN. And I understand why this analogy isn't perfect. I do. But because I

lived through it, I think it's maybe more meaningful to me. During the Mueller investigation, MSNBC in particular and their prime time commentators were incredibly invested in where their audience wanted them to be, which was that Donald Trump was absolutely guilty. Mueller was circling him. He was going to wind up in jail. This was already a done deal. And despite, including private meetings that I had, despite all evidence of where the special counsel's investigation was going, you know, I wasn't told this in specific terms, but I was left with the impression that the train was too far out and that they were just going to have to wait and like sort of do the big reveal that Mueller wasn't, you know,

going to find any evidence of criminal collaboration with Russia during the 2016 campaign because there was no way to tell their audience that ahead of time after they had said, you know, dropped all of these hints and this, and we can tie this together. And so I wonder what those internal emails would look like. And whether again, in fact, because these news organizations are profit-driven and that profit is driven by ratings, and the ratings are driven by an audience

that is not representative of the country as a whole for any of these news organizations. And that, you know, set aside even cable news for a second because I think the New York Times is a really interesting example where we can sort of compare a before and after. The difference in the New York Times when it was an advertising-based model

versus now when it's a subscription-based model, I mean, they have entirely changed their revenue, basically for the New York Times. And I think it's really changed how the newsroom operates, not the quality of the New York Times or even what stories they're covering necessarily. But we hear a lot more about how fraught those newsroom decisions are. And I think that's in part because it's not about whether Ford's going to advertise their truck in your newspaper.

Now it's about how many subscriptions is it costing you? And how do you balance that with the ethics of journalism, with your responsibilities as a journalist. Their intention, that's the whole thing. And their intention at Fox News, their intention at MSNBC,

and their intention at the New York Times. And so why are we so shocked and so tutting all of this when that's been the way? Well, I want to take umbrage with one thing you said there. I think the New York Times is now a wordal and crossword-based revenue system.

That's why I pay them. No, I mean, Audience capture is a thing. It's been a thing for decades, centuries, the adage, the customer is always right. You hear that applied in all other lines of, or all other lines of industry, but when it comes to journalism, it's frowned upon.

And I think there are good reasons why it should be frowned upon, but it still holds just as true, right? You wouldn't have somebody come into your restaurant and order a dish and be like, you idiot, that's a terrible dish to order. You know, why would you order this? We're not going to make that for you. You're going to say, yeah, of course, we'll put cheese on an ice cream Sunday, whatever, whatever you want.

We'll do it. And so that's what these media organizations are doing too. They're customers, which, again, as you mentioned, are kind of the most polarized handful of million Americans on either side of the political spectrum are ordering increasingly and increasingly extreme products from these companies, and so they're going to give it to them. And there's a chicken and egg situation here where, you know, who is convincing Americans that that's what they want and who's kind of, you know, who's leading and who's following. But I do think a significant factor here that is often under discussed is just the

fragmentation of media in general and how in the 50s, if we had something like this play out, you know, the anchors could be like, oh, where are you going to go? The one other channel. And now, you know, now there are 600,000 places these people could go. And that's, I mean, that's what we see from these emails is that Fox was incredibly worried about Newsmax at the time. because, you know, if we're not going to give these viewers what they want, they'll get it. They'll just get it from somewhere else, you know. And so it's an issue where everybody can hyper-focus their own media diet, curate it for exactly what they believe in themselves and just reinforce it.

If you're not happy with what you're getting somewhere, you can find exactly what you want somewhere else because there are so many media companies. And it's a shame that, you know, the places that, you know, the places that, that process drives people often are less responsible, less beholden to journalistic norms, less fact-based. But I don't really see a way out of this unless the kind of Americans change what they want and kind of change their news diet preferences. Can I tell you something that also will really bother me? Inevitably, every time I say that the Mueller team did not find any evidence of criminal behavior by the Trump campaign related to Russia's interference with the

2016 campaign, I am told I am wrong every time. There will be someone who's like, that's just not true. It is so strange to me because I know exactly what's causing that. It's not reading the Mueller report. I'll tell you that much. Now, look, this is separate from the obstruction section. I'm talking about the actual evidence that the Trump campaign worked with in any criminal sense, who we know did interfere with the 2016 election because we indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers. And it's this just alternate reality where Mueller did find it. And then when you ask like, okay, then why do you think nothing happened to Donald Trump? There's like a little bit of a like, I don't know. It's because they didn't find it. I don't. Sarah, the great thing about conspiracies

is that the less evidence you find, the more it proves a conspiracy. But they think the Mueller, Investigation itself found this because I can tell you exactly what news organizations they were going to that were telling them all along that it was already there. And then when the Mueller report didn't have that, they basically spent like an hour on it and moved on. And if you didn't catch that hour, you just moved, you know, you just thought it was there and whatever. Um, so David, what, something I really love about our modern era right now. And I've said this before is that there are just so many things going on at once that by and large, you can hand people the exact same scenarios for both sides of the ideological spectrum and make them sort of grapple

with the first principles of what's going on. So I want to spend just a second on the defamation side of this, the actual court case. Ron DeSantis has proposed a bill in Florida to change the defamation standards under state law. And that has been met widely with, you know, this is trying to and a free press. This is undermining the First Amendment. We saw some similar conversations around Sarah Palin when she sued the New York Times for defamation related to an op-ed that included false information. But, you know, the pushback was they didn't mean to include false information. It was an accident. And do you really, are you going to bankrupt the New York Times over what is journalism, even if journalism gets it wrong sometimes? And then we have

this Fox case where those same people are saying that this is good because I don't like what they said. Now, obviously, you can say the facts are different. This actually meets the current defamation standards and all of that. But do we want a journalism standard where you can't interview people of a side you don't agree with? David, you've been doing this a long time. What am I supposed to think about defamation laws? Is Ron DeSantis right? Are the Dominion cheerleaders right? Was Sarah Palin right? I don't know. So legally, I don't know. I don't have a good opinion. However, I have opinions. And I will tell you that as a journalist, I actually struggle all of the time with who I'm quoting and what they are saying. Because I don't think it's ethical for me

to give a platform to sources, especially even on the record, especially, not on the record, but even on the record, to say defamatory things that cannot be proven or that impugn character or suggest criminality. And I'll even break it down this far. Because I report on campaign so often, I regularly get packaged quotes from a campaign or a member of Congress or their spokesperson or a campaign spokesperson, that's, you know, about two paragraphs long and says that my political opponent or my opponent on this legislation hates children and wants to strip old people of their dignity and generally kill a bunch of puppies and all these things. And even though most people probably know that this is political spin and political

talk, I actually don't want to give platform to somebody to say thing, to make accusations that are in many ways very defamatory and unfair. Unless then I'm going to spend half the story giving the person accused of getting to send me their two paragraphs of why the other person is actually the puppy killer and I'm the nice person. So I end up cropping these quotes in a way that just say, my bill is good and my opponent's policy would hurt the economy. because that's a fair accusation and it doesn't have to be backed up by, you know, any evidence. It's just a political point of view. And so I do think as journalists, we have to be very cognizant of the platform that we provide

for other people to say things that may be defamatory, whether it meets the legal definition of defamation or not. So in that way, this lawsuit could be very instructive. But even if Fox News wins the lawsuit, I don't think it. It changes the fact that any journalist, whether an opinion journalist or somebody who doesn't publicly take a side in their reporting, should be fair about not elevating things that they personally believe are untrue when it comes to what these people are saying about character or about whether or not you did something illegal. I don't really care if a television host wants to put somebody on TV, and that person says, I think Senator Chuck Schumer's a mean person who doesn't like kids. But I would have a problem with putting that person on TV if they said, Chuck Schumer committed a crime. Okay, what's your evidence?

Well, everybody knows he committed a crime. It's just obvious. And here, you know, he lays out whatever the crime is that he's making it. That's where I think the line should be drawn, ethically. as a journalist. And I leave the legalese to you. Declan, speaking of that, Ron DeSantis, as I said, rolls out his new state defamation standard in Florida. Anonymous sources are presumed to be false. Failure to verify is evidence of actual malice, changing the standard for what a public figure is for the purpose of applying that actual malice standard. All by the way,

weeds that we will get into on advisory opinions. But I'm curious about the podcast. politics of this, Ron DeSantis has really used this legislative session to just have a weekly press release that has gotten him an enormous amount of attention and conversation from the right. Is this how to run a great campaign in 2024? If you're a governor, sure. You know, that's an avenue not available to some of the, that would be candidates. We've been watching this legislative session very closely for good reason. It's almost like a comedian road testing some of their material where they'll go to smaller clubs, you know, across the country and try some riskier stuff out and see how the audience reacts. You know, you have a decibel measuring

device and you're like, okay, do you guys like this? Is this good? Should I do more of this? Or should I move on to the next subject? And I think that's a little bit what he's doing. doing here is, you know, the stakes are not as high to, you know, experiment with some of this stuff in Florida. I'm sure there are some of his constituents who are probably frustrated by his national aspirations, kind of shaping their lives in Florida a little bit. I can think of one theme park in particular that is probably pretty frustrated. No, it's a way to demonstrate what he cares about, what he's going to make his campaign about, and also kind of get feedback, see how primary voters are responding, see whether other candidates start to adopt some of this stuff

as well as he kind of goes forward. We've talked about this a lot on this podcast and elsewhere at the dispatch. I think he has kind of a streak of promising a lot on cable news and in press releases. And then when you come back to the story six to eight months later, you realize, oh, that wasn't exactly what you said was going to happen, whether it be things getting struck down or or enjoined in court, whether it's the grand pronouncement about Disney being stripped of its special district that ends up becoming something much more watered down where they can no longer build nuclear reactors on their property, which they've never really had plans to do anyways. We'll have to see how many of these things that get passed and get announced

in the next couple months here during this legislative session end up sticking around. But for his own political purposes, he'll be well into his campaign by then by the time the bill comes do. And so I think it's a great strategy for him. David, a story making the rounds that Joe Biden may not run. Is this real or is this journalist looking for something to write about? I mean, if we write about it, then it's real, right? I think that number one, you know, number one, from a reporting perspective, we're always looking to be ahead of the curve and find something new and we're always talking to our sources and when and so much of political reporting and politics generally is about expectations. So if the expectation was that Joe Biden was supposed

to announce in February and we're about out of February and he hasn't announced and now the timeline is April, well, what's going on? Maybe there's something going on. And then somebody tells you, you know, he may not run again. Had the expectation been that he was going to announce in June, well, we would just operate under the assumption that he's going to announce in June and not start writing stories that he might not run because it's about expectations. I will say that the longer Joe Biden takes to make an announcement, the more I think he will run because it's less of a runway he's giving his party to replace him. and he must know that, and the people around him must know that, and he knows that as well as

anybody because he's been doing this for so long. I think there's way too much focus about the people around him. Joe Biden knows what he's doing. He got himself elected president. I mean, he may not be good with fiscal policy, and maybe he should have gone to East Palestine. I'm not saying he knows everything, but he knows politics, and he is the president. So if he's taking his time, it could be as simple as, you know, this being president thing is much better than being a candidate. I think I'll take my time. But because of his age and because there actually has been a question about whether he would seek a second term, I think it's natural for these questions to arise. And I think it's perfectly fine for people that do what we do for a living to go explore these questions,

as long as they're reported properly and credited properly. Declan, the story mentioned comparisons to Hamlet. Indecisiveness, long decision-making. process that he doesn't want to make a choice in the end. This could be pretty bad for the Democratic Party if he just sits in waffles until June and then decides not to run, which again, I think is highly unlikely for all the reasons David said, and for all the just very practical reasons of why I think Joe Biden absolutely would run again. But nevertheless, I just found that interesting, this idea that you know, you spend that long in the Senate, the most deliberative body in the world, which you can say with a serious tone or with a sarcastic tone, but either way, you don't have to make a lot of

decisions in the Senate. And that Joe Biden sort of learned bad decision-making habits from that and that's going to cause a lot of frustration, whether you're Gavin Newsom or the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, or Pete Buttigieg, for that matter. I think you could definitely make the case that Joe Biden is indecisive on a lot of key things. He's landed in a place where us at the the dispatch are generally in favor of where he is on Ukraine, but it's taken him a long time to get there with lots of fits and starts of, are we going to send tanks, aren't we? Are we going to apply these sanctions, aren't we? And you see that playing out with this decision as well. I mean, I think I agree with David and you that he does ultimately end up pulling the trigger and running.

I mean, his approval rating right now is the highest it's been in over a year, even after kind of took a brief dip with the document scandal, and he really has consolidated the Democratic Party behind him in a way that I didn't think would be possible when he was first taking office. I think I saw some polling that shows more than 90% of Democrats favor him or have a favorable approval rating of him. And he's kind of quelled the progressive left of wing of the president. party in part by becoming more of a progressive left-wing president than he necessarily campaigned on. And so I think he will make this decision and run again. But you're right,

it's difficult for these candidates, these would-be candidates, the people that you mentioned, Sarah, plus Amy Klobuchar, plus some of these other senators. I saw Bernie Sanders was mentioned in that piece that we're talking about Politico. It makes life difficult for them. But, you know, he's the president. He gets to do it. And everybody kind of has to wait around for him. All right. Now for another episode of Not Worth Your Time. This time we're going to talk about Roald Doll. The estate of Roald Doll and the publisher have decided to spruce up some of his writing, taking out things that they don't like anymore. I think one of the, you know, sort of best examples is changing, calling someone fat, calling them enormous. I'm not sure that makes it

less insulting, by the way. But I think that was the idea, at least. And I think that those who are interested in banning books from schools have been rightly criticized. Banning books doesn't have a particularly good pedigree in our history. But the idea of sanitizing books that if you think a word is now offensive or a concept, that you just take it out of the book, change it, make it nicer. I think that is in some ways much creepier and scarier. because it's hard to know what's being sanitized. And it also lacks humility to me, this idea that you're so right in your modern chair right now and that you have nothing to learn from people in the past, that you're not willing to have a conversation with, you know,

your kids or whoever's reading this book about how mores change over time, what we think we've learned. And by the way, this raises the specter that we're wrong about a lot of things right now. and that future generations will be judging us. And it's such an important part of reading old books. And old, by the way, here is, you know, 50 years old. And yet, as many folks have pointed out, this didn't turn into the culture war that you thought it would. Nobody on the left is defending this.

It seems like nobody thinks this is a good idea, aside from Roll Doll's estate and their publisher, which maybe will change their mind. after they've seen sort of a universal condemnation that sanitizing old books is a bad, bad, bad idea. So, Declan, is this worth our time? Yes, it's worth our time because, you know, people are going to continue to read these books,

and he's obviously a famed literary character figure, and we don't want this kind of trend to continue. It's so incredibly thorny to me. It's like the part of me wants to, you know, respect the private copyright laws that allow the owner of these copyrights to do what they will, even if I think it's really stupid. The history major in me wants to preserve these texts as they were originally written. The part of me that is very, very opposed to anti-Semitism wants to knock, roll down. People should go look up some of the things that he's said as late as like, the 1980s about Jews, there are very real things to criticize him on, but part of what I think

this debate shows is that by preserving the text, it also shows how far we've come from some of these terrible things being accepted at a given time. I don't think whitewashing what was considered acceptable does anything, what were you saying, Sarah, is that like, we don't know what's not going to be considered acceptable in 40 or 50 years. And it's useful to see kind of how that progresses over time and whitewashing this hurts our ability to have that humility and admit our own mistakes as we're going forward. But David, this was a choice about capitalism. They clearly believe they will sell more Roll Doll books by calling people enormous instead of fat. There were a bunch of other changes. I'm just going to keep using that one as the exemplar.

Private company, you know, trying to make a profit. If Roll Doll himself had wanted to change this, would it change our opinion? And nobody on the left is trying to defend this, unlike the book banners that have tended to be on the right, though not exclusively. So, David, is this worth our time? Oh, God. This is so depressing. Listen, first of all, if my wife asked me how she looked in a particular outfit, I wouldn't say to myself, well, I can't tell her she looks fat. That would be rude, but I can tell her she looks enormous. So it would be about the last thing I ever said to her as her husband. If they're trying to sanitize these books because they want to make a buck fine. I mean, it's their right. They can do what they want.

What I find depressing, and I think it is worth our time to discuss because this is such a widespread issue. I'm a big fan of James and the Giant Peach, even though the guy was an anti-Semite or said things he shouldn't have said or whatever the case is. I don't care. I like the book. There were other old doll books I liked, and I will let my kids read them. I mean, there are always exceptions to every rule. But if I start making a list of everybody who's head I've climbed inside to find mean things they've said about me or people like me, I mean, I won't be able to leave the house. I mean, God knows what my dry cleaner thinks about you.

I don't really care. Can you dry clean my shirt to live in a censorious society where everybody has to worry about every last word that they say. And I'm in the business of like worrying about words because that's what we do. It just becomes a very unhappy place to live. You know, there's a lot of debate over what is actually anti-Semitism, but this probably isn't up for debate. This is Roald Dahl in 1983 that Declan just sent me. There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity. I mean, there's always a reason why anti-anything

crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason. It's not really one of those debatable anti-Semitism. I can't believe Matilda said that. Terrible. But it's all fixed now because we say enormous instead of fat. So it's all good. All right. Thank you so much for joining us, Declan and David. And thank you for listening. You can give this podcast a rating, become a member of the dispatch to hop in the comments section.

Or we'll just talk to you next week. I'm going to be able to be.