The Dispatch Podcast - The Politics of Disaster | Roundtable

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Sarah, Kevin, and Steve discuss the devastation of recent hurricanes and the politics of the disaster response. Also, with several interviewers fawning over Kamala Harris, journalists coming under fire for committing journalism, and newsrooms collapsing into emotional struggle sessions, they ask: Is CBS News worth their time? The Agenda —Political polarization —Reliability in voting trends —Hurricane politics —FEMA conspiracies —Blame in crisis management (Bush v. Biden) —CBS producers shield Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamala Harris from journalism —The ethics of editing journalism Show Notes: —The effect of conspiracies —The CBS News interview before the struggle sessions The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Editorial director and executive producer: Adaam James Levin-Areddy Associate producers: Victoria Holmes and Noah Hickey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgur. That's Steve Hayes and Kevin Williamson. Hello, gentlemen. Hey, morning. Kevin, hi. Hey. Just so excited to be here. We have quailudes, Kevin, this morning. A weird thing to say before a podcast, I'm just not feeling the chit-chat. Let's get to it. We're going to be taking five-word answers only, nothing more. All right. So let's get to it. Look, state of the race in the polling averages right now, this podcast could have been recorded in August.

You have Harris, you know, less than a point up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada. you have Trump less than a point-up in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina. Pennsylvania is a pure toss-up. And at the same time, Trump is performing better with almost every demographic group than he did in 2020, which Republicans keep seeing as a good sign for Trump. And I'm just looking at math and thinking, no, I think what I'm. I'm seeing is the Republicans' traditional electoral college advantage disappearing as the country becomes more polarized, which is actually exactly what we would expect. So let me explain

that real quick. Electoral college, right? Your state's votes are based on their congressional representation. So your number of congressional seats is based on your population. So in that sense, it should look a lot like the popular vote. And then you get a plus two for being a state. And so that's how the little states gets slightly more representation than the big states, stuff like that. So that's the electoral college. So as you run up the margins in already blue or already red states, that electoral college advantage goes down. And what had been the case was that Democrats had a lot of their voters concentrated in places in states that they were already winning. So as California got bluer and bluer, that didn't help Democrats. They already

California. As New York got bluer and bluer, it didn't help Democrats. It already was blue. But as the red states get redder due to polarization, negative polarization, Trump's getting better numbers with any given demographic group. But let's take black men, for instance, where he's performing better than he was in 2020. As long as those black men live in Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, states that he was already going to win, it's not going to help him and that's how you lose your electoral college advantage. So on the one hand, Kevin, I think that is, I think having a different result from the popular vote in the electoral college is not great for the country because most people don't pay great attention. That's not

really what the function of the electoral college was meant to be. So I think that's good that neither party knows that they have an electoral college advantage versus a popular vote advantage just for like campaign, health of democracy, yada, yada. On the other hand, why Republicans don't have an electoral college advantage seems bad for the country, that each state becomes more polarized and has less in common with its neighbors. What say you? In five words or less. I'm not sure I would really agree with your entire premise there that the states are becoming more polarized in the sense that you've got really, really close races in a lot of states. I mean, it would be hard to describe Pennsylvania as being polarized when it's almost exactly

divided or some of these other states. Trump's advantage with black men is not going to help him in a lot of places, probably, but it may help him in Georgia. And Georgia is a pretty closely divided state. And so I think that's going to matter some. It is sort of interesting that you've seen in states like Texas becoming a bit less strongly Republican than they have largely driven by out-of-state migration into the state. And so you're getting Democratic votes that are locked up in Texas where they're not doing the Democrats really

any good, where they might have done some good in some other places. So it's a kind of it's a kind of a natural gerrymander, I guess, in a sense where you've got this big district that you can dump Democrats into and not have them make much of a difference until, of course, the election comes when they do, which will be, you know, one of these days, although probably probably not this year. I wonder if the Senate races really tell us anything about this where we see some really closely divided states. But in Pennsylvania, you've got the Democrat, pretty, it's a leading Democrat for the Senate race, Arizona, Nevada as well. So maybe those states are, or not as much of a toss-up as we think they are. If you look at those things

as two pieces of evidence, rather than one piece of evidence, although I'm not entirely confident in my ability to read polls at that kind of granular level. but I thought you might, Sarah, have some thoughts. So, Steve, I mean, part of this that Kevin touches on is the polling question. And I said this last time. I think the less reliable the polls are, the better because people can't just look at the polls and decide whether to vote. Like, go vote.

The polls are not going to tell you who's going to win this race. And as of today, they definitely do not tell you who's going to win the presidential race. And I don't know that they're going to tell you that much about some of these Senate races. because, look, when I say that within the margin of error on these states, I mean within the mathematical margin of error. Like math, when you're polling a small number of people in a large group, the math tells us how likely that is to be correct. So it's a 95% chance that it's right within three points.

That's just a mathematical fact. That doesn't take into account the pollsters decisions and recipe, if you will, for how they wait different groups of voters based on, who responded. And when you're talking about so few respondents and them, those who do respond having to represent the 95% of people who don't answer the phone or respond to surveys and assume that the 5% look like the 95%, I think it's fair to say there's probably another 2% margin of error on the recipe. That's a 5% margin of error, which would make basically every poll we have within the margin of error.

Right. I think that's exactly where we sit right now. And, you know, I was listening to the 538 politics podcast yesterday or the day before. And they had a discussion about exactly these kinds of questions, you know, the changes in polling, what affects the changes in polling methodology, the changes in polling methodology, the changes in polling outreach, you know, whether people are on landlines as they were 30 years ago versus cell phones versus now online. I mean, it's so different today than it was just, you know, 20, 25 years ago that pollsters have been kind of constantly scrambling to keep up with the best way to get the best information. And then there is the waiting question. These pollsters are basically making educated guesses on what the electorate on election day or, you know, in the early vote and on election day will look like. Some of the pollsters get it right. Some of the pollsters get it closer to right, and some of pollsters have bad misses on what the electorate is going to look like.

I think if you're looking at this race, and we've said this before in these discussions, you're far better off paying attention to trends in votes rather than actual numbers, right? So if you have seen, you know, 10 polls in the last two months, and I'm making this up, showing Tim Sheehe, leading John Tester and Montana, by five points or more, you know, something out of the margin of error. I think that it's a good reason to believe that Tim Shehee is leading John Tester. Now, how, you know, by what margin? I don't know. Certainly that would be consistent with the conversations I've had with people who are pulling those races privately and who've been working on the races as well.

But in terms of like putting a lot of stock in these, you know, seemingly daily changes in Pennsylvania. Harris is one point up. Trump is one point up. It's a fool's Aaron to try to really understand what that means. Every time the question of the sort of selection bias and polls comes up, I think of the worst job I ever had, which was doing telephone survey market research.

And we weren't supposed to be able to tell who our client was. It's a big corporate secret, but it was obviously Alpha Romeo. And this was in the late 1980s when Alpha hadn't sold cars in the United States. in like 20 or 25 years at that point. They were thinking about re-enduring the U.S. market. They hired just do some market research for them. So the survey took an hour to complete on the telephone and was about a car company

that hadn't sold cars in the United States in a quarter of a century. So who do you think respond? You know, shut-ins, crazy people, and people who are absolutely, are maniacs. And so I am not sure that created a lot of useful data for the people at Alpha Romeo, and there's subsequent experiences.

in the North American market and sort of bear that out I think that they haven't haven't had great research supporting their product there and I don't think that the polling in political polls obviously is quite that bad

as bad as some of this incompetent corporate market research but it's got to have the same set of problems I think I mean I wouldn't respond to if I had a landline phone or if I'm getting a telephone call that I know is from a pollster

I'm not answering that phone call I'm not talking to anybody about this stuff I mean I don't recognize as a number on my caller ID, you don't pick it up. If you're not in my contacts, I don't pick it. And basically, if you're not my wife or someone who writes me a check, I don't pick it. Yeah, I mean, and this is the question, right? Is someone who does pick up the phone politically different than someone who doesn't pick up the phone? Because in general, like, in theory, it shouldn't matter. Like, if the people who pick up the phone aren't any

different than the people who don't, no big deal. The problem is, I think we all kind of know that they probably are different. But see, the pollsters also know this. sponsor rates have been going down. Do you think that 2024 is it going to be an overcorrection on previous polling errors or still an undercorrection? Because part of what was surprising, I think, is from 2016, everyone thought that there could be an overcorrection in 2020. And once again, it was an undercorrection for Trump support.

I think Trump supporters are notoriously difficult to poll. That's a big part of the problem. They're skeptical of polling in general. They're skeptical of institutions, and they don't want to participate in what they see to be, you know, and potentially a rigged process. So they don't. And, you know, I think the challenges of pollsters then is to take the responses they do get from Trump supporters and try to wait those. But the waiting process is very difficult. I mean, it is literally just a guess.

They have all of these inputs and they can, you know, toggle the switches in various ways to come up with the electorate that they think they're likely to see in this election. But ultimately, it's very sophisticated guesswork and some of them get it wrong. And I think it's possible on this 538 podcast was very interesting to listen to them talking about sort of the possibility that something well outside the margin of error could take place. I mean, because we've all been watching these polls, particularly in the battleground states, particularly at the presidential level, that show the race effectively a dead heat. And, you know, you've had polling in, you know, what, five of the seven that can show either person winning a battleground state, either candidate winning a battleground state. What if all of the polls undercount Trump voters by 5 percent, you're then looking at something

closer to a landslide, which isn't, which wouldn't be crazy? The same would be true on the Harris side. What if the way that the pollsters are waiting the electorate doesn't factor in, you know, variable X? And variable X turns out to be really meaningful in a way that the polling just didn't pick up this time. It's not inconceivable that you could see, you know, a shift, either a late shift or a steady election that the polling just didn't get in favor of Harris. So I think we have to be open to those possibilities that what looks today like a dead heat by looking at virtually all of the polling

ends up not being a dead heat and being something quite different. I have a quick question. Sir, you may know this. How does one become a pollster? Is there a course of study? Do you, I mean, do you, really the serious question,

you agree to PhD in statistics? Because when you have large groups of people all doing the same thing, you can often count on their mistakes to sort of cancel each other out, right? So if the mistakes and their biases are truly random, then you're going to get, if not a total canceling out effect,

then at least a partial cancel. If everyone's making the same mistakes, everyone adds the same biases, you're going to get an exaggeration effect. So are they engaged in some sort of course of mathematical and statistical study where they're working from the same set of underlying mathematical assumptions

so that their biases and their mistakes are all going to be roughly in the same direction, or is there a way that we could maybe even encourage sort of cancelling out effect, or is this there aren't enough pollsters really to create a robust effect on that front? That's an interesting question. I mean, in theory, the market should work here because they're all trying to be better than each other. And they're all trying to find new ways to fix the response problem, for instance, to wait their poll in a more accurate, meaningful way. You know, all of their recipes are

secret, basically. In terms of how one becomes a pollster, there is something a little interesting about that because most pollsters start in a polling company, but at some point, it's sort of like a law firm, right? The people who run the law firm aren't necessarily the best at presenting a case to a jury. You also have to be good at running a business. And a polling company is a business, right? And there's management and there's all sorts of other things. So on the one hand, if you have your very best pollster who ends up running the business, that person's not really running the polling anymore in a sense. And then flip side also is a problem.

If you have your best pollster as the math person, but then someone else is running the whole business. So I think it's like any other industry where, I don't know, there's all sorts of mess behind the scenes. But in theory, the market dynamics of wanting to beat your competitors should win out. The problem is they only really get tested every two years, four years. Unlike the consumer side, by the way, which I find fascinating, those never get tested.

There's never an election day for product markets or issue polling. I mean, y'all know my beef with issue polling. Oh, contrary, there's an election day every day. It's on the market. That's how markets work, right? So you have, you think about my favorite example, this is New Coke, right? So Coca-Cola, the most powerful beverages company in the world has all the best people. They've got every PhD beverage guy in the world.

They've got all the world's best market research to get the best marketing team. They've got this crazy distribution network that people use to get drugs to people in, like, remote places in Africa. True Story, Code does this for people because they're the only people who know how to get stuff everywhere in the world. And they roll out this product that nobody wants. And it fails in 55 days or something. They have to pull it off the shelf. And this happens all the time with big companies. Like my other favorite example is Clarell's touch of yogurt shampoo, which yogurt shampoo, this was a thing in the 70s.

It was a real product. And it existed for some time. And someone thought that was a great idea, and it just went away. Markets are really, really good at making those kinds of judgments. You don't need an election because you've got people making decisions with their own resources and their own assets. That happens really pretty quickly. A better analog would be that if we had an election like every week and you lost something if you picked a bad candidate. Yeah, I guess, like on issue polling, for instance, it's really hard to pull apart why something is popular or unpopular based solely on that issue.

because I, of course, don't think people are answering the question you're asking them. And so I think there's something similar going on with product market research often. You think that the research is telling you one thing. The market may respond and tell you that that product's popular. It doesn't mean your market research was necessarily correct, though, if that makes sense. I do think there's a way to incentivize pundits, and I've been arguing for this for years, that people who go on television and make predictions should be made to wager on. we should it should be a professional norm for plundits that you have to have a sizable bet

on any prediction you make that you say you have strong confidence in so if you say i'm 100% sure eris is going to win pennsylvania you got to put up 5,000 okay so what's something that you are confident enough about that you would predict it on this podcast and put money behind it uh comela herriss is going to win california bold definitely i'll put up i'll put a a lot of money. I think she's going to win California. I don't feel that way. You know, it was interesting.

I had this conversation with some really smart poll people yesterday. I was talking to some folks about this in particular looking at Wisconsin. And I was reminded that in 2020, the final, I believe it was the final pre-election poll that the Washington Post and ABC News did before Wisconsin showed Joe Biden with a 17 point lead in Wisconsin. I remember that. among likely voters. And, you know, there, there's also this problem. I think everybody knew at those places like, that's not right. Like, Joe Biden is not going to beat Donald Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin. And he ended up winning by less than 1%. You know, then the question arises, what do you do with that information? Like, you've done the survey. You've done the process the right

way, but it produces a bad result, which happened. You know, that it wasn't an option for them. to throw those results out. Can you imagine if they had done that and then it were discovered that there was this polling result that they didn't share with the public and there would be all sorts of transparency questions? That happens more often than not.

And I believe the New York Times final poll of Wisconsin in 2020 sort of didn't show quite as decisive a Biden victory, but was also that kind of an outlier. And I think how you contend with outliers in this environment is also an interesting question. I've just come to believe that Wisconsin isn't a real place.

I think it's a conspiracy of cartographers. We need to send you there. We need to, you know, that should be your next piece. I'll give you all the reporting I've done for my Wisconsin piece, and you can go there. And you'll probably want to move there because most people who visit Wisconsin do. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security. brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance can be

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Application times may vary. Rates may vary. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. SquareSpace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers. or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments,

and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Kevin, can we talk a little hurricane politics? So Helene struck and moved its way up into North Carolina, as we know, causing enormous amounts of flooding and destruction. You wrote a really beautiful, lovely piece that I wish we could just have you read the whole thing out loud like an audio book right now.

Instead, I'll ask you to summarize it. And then Milton hit this week. you know, I literally saw a video of a meteorologist choking up as he discussed what would happen when, you know, Milton formed in the Gulf and moved its way toward Florida. You know, talking to my friends in Florida, don't get me wrong. It's a hurricane and it hit them. But the power's out, you know, there's water. It's not great, but it's not that bad either.

I mean, I guess, first of all, why are we so bad at predicting which hurricanes will actually cause life-altering amounts of damage? because we seem really bad at that. I remember after Katrina hit another hurricane hit right in the wake of Katrina and everyone freaked out and evacuated because of Katrina, it was a non-event as a weather thing goes,

but actually a lot of people died in the evacuation because it was August and it was hot in Texas and Louisiana. People ran out of gas just sitting on freeways. I mean, it was really bad. But this time around, add into that sort of pendulum swinging reaction that we have to storms,

lying political one-upsmanship. And I think the worst part, Kevin, that you really capture in your piece is that one side, the Republicans, were incentivized to say that Americans were the worst when in fact the communities in North Carolina that you wrote about were actually exhibiting some of the best of America.

One quick thing about just predicting the weather. It's, as we're talking about forecasting and politics, weather's kind of one of those funny things it really depends very strongly on what level of specificity you're talking about. So if you want to say what's the average temperature in this county in southwestern Virginia going to be in February next year, you can get it typically within a couple of degrees. If you want to say what's the temperature going to be at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on this particular day, two years from now, very, very hard to get that, you're very accurate.

So big kind of, you know, global trends in weather and climate are sort of reasonably predictable, a very specific ones aren't. So one of the big differences between Florida and North Carolina in Nashville where I was is that when you live in the mountains hundreds of miles from the coast and you're at 2,200 feet elevation,

hurricanes aren't something you worry about a lot. It's unusual to get hurricane-in-selected weather in a place like that. I'm just like, you know, if you live in Aspen, Colorado, you get all sorts of problems, but you don't really worry too much about tropical storms. I got 99 problems, but the Gulf Coast hurricanes ain't one.

right yeah Asheville and the lovely named Bunkum County and if you were Charles Dickens writing a novel you couldn't call the place Bunkum County

would just seem to to you on the nose but Bunkum County is not the sort of place is prepared to deal with that sort of thing like you know

forest fires and kind of mountain related things they're pretty good at or pretty prepared for but not really hurricanes so unfortunately for them they'd had a system

that had moved through their unrelated to the hurricane but right before it that had dumped eight inches of rain on them in two days before the hurricane storms got there. And then those waters came down on top of it. And they knew it was going to be bad, but they didn't know really quite how bad it was going to be

until their little river there, which normally is about maybe 13, 14 feet wide, suddenly was 200 feet wide and was up to the second floor of buildings that were hundreds of yards from the riverbikes. And they're, you know, knocked out bridges to do that sort of thing. And it is a reminder that we have these kind of nested vulnerabilities where we're really relying on digital communication and cell phones and things like that, which don't work

if there's no electricity. Things like gasoline and diesel pumps don't work without electricity. A lot of the water systems don't work very well or don't work at all without it. And, you know, I live hundreds of miles from there, but my town is still under a boil water, you know, advisory up from this stuff. So I had to dump out a whole lot, very expensive baby formula a couple of days ago that I'd made before the warning came through. And that was galling and took a long time to remake it. So that's my real hardship story for the hurricane. But one of the nice things you do see sometimes in places like Asheville and other places in the country is, you Americans are generally smart, resourceful, decent community-minded people.

Americans are really good at lots of things. They're just idiots when it comes to voting. They're not very good at being boaters, but they're really good at like starting businesses and solving complex problems and running churches and community organizations and things like that. And Asheville is kind of fun because

it's sort of a little Austin, right? It's very left-wing, progressive. It's a little slice of Brooklyn, it feels like, even down to being kind of dirty in the middle of this, you know, glorious Appalachian conservative-leaning countryside. And so you get Amish guys coming in from somewhere in their hats and beards and these evangelical church leaders and these hipster

restaurateurs and people with rings in their noses and white people with dreadlocks and the whole you know the whole array of that sort of meal you kind of working together and it was really quite nice to see you know they're doing smart intelligent things you often the first things we think of are you know potable water of course which is a huge thing and in spite of all the conspiracy kookery there were just dozens and dozens and dozens of FEMA trailers uh with big tanks, marked potable water, and someone sent me a photograph of them distributing what looked like. It must have been 50,000 MREs, just at one particular site. So they were there doing, you know, what they're supposed to do. But often it's other stuff that, you know, people

aren't thinking about, like there's no way to recharge cell phones or other kinds of communication devices. People had a really hard time getting baby supplies, baby formula, diapers, wipes, those kinds of things. Those were really the first things to kind of go from the churches and other people that were distributing those. It is disheartening to see people try to use this as a conspiracy theory. If Trump ends up losing the election and losing North Carolina, I guarantee you there will be endless stories about how if the Jews didn't cause the storm in the first place, they certainly stopped FEMA from, you know, doing everything they could to help the people there to suppress the voter

turn out for Trump in North Carolina because the places that are hardest hit and hardest to serve are sparsely populated rural areas. They just don't have a lot of immediate resources at hand. So the people in Asheville, I mean, compared to people, you know, 40 or 50 miles from there, are in pretty good shape because you've got urban life. There are certain benefits that come to dense patterns of living. And there are benefits that come from more remote patterns of living, too, but one of them is not having people close to you to help you on an emergency.

One of the much commentable on stories and I'm going to go try to track these guys down if I can maybe later in the week are these guys who are pack mule enthusiasts and they've got a bunch of pack mules and they're using them to deliver insulin and things to people up in the mountains where you still can't cross the roads. You know, that kind of stuff is neat. But as I was saying on the Remnant podcast the other day with Mitch Kokai from John Locke Foundation, it will have a disproportionate effect in terms of people's ability to get. to the polls and vote. People in the urban areas are simply going to have an easier time of it almost certainly than people in the rural

and outlying areas are. There's no way to fix this stuff, this infrastructure before election day. It may have enough of an effect. I think Mitch was saying that if you look at the votes in 2020 from the 25 counties in North Carolina

most affected by the storm, the ones that have emergency declarations, they were net 227,000 votes for Trump, something like that. And the ones, again, who are going to have the easiest time voting almost certainly will be the ones in Democrat-leaning urban areas.

So see, part of what I've seen is the comparison to Katrina. You know, why was Bush whacked so hard after Katrina? And yet Biden... Did you just say Bushwhack? Biden's not getting blamed for the fact

that Kevin's still under a boil water warning. And in our Slack channel, I saw a lot of people say that they thought Bush was treated unfairly. after Katrina. And I guess as someone who very much, you know, lived through that, I mean, kind of like, okay, blaming Bush, this comes to the like, do we blame presidents for things that are not in their control, even if it's the people under them or maybe it's the state, but they're the

president. Like, I'm fine with that discussion. But the idea that the aftermath of Katrina wasn't a total effing disaster, I feel like, is just memory holing. Yeah, I think it was a disaster. And I think if you go back and read histories of that period, there's lots of blame to be distributed all around, right? I mean, there was sort of a knucklehead mayor. There were problems between federal government and states in coordination. Bush administration deserves a fair share blame, of course.

but yeah i mean i think there was there was this effort in in that moment when you're watching videos of people in such distress there's this natural urge to say like somebody's at fault we're going to blame somebody here and i think we saw that and it becomes really easy to blame the person in charge of all of it which was george said be bush at the time i think you've seen some of that on the right um certainly with with joe biden and beyond just the conspiracy stuff. I mean, the conspiracy stuff has been so unbelievably stupid. Like, the fact that, I mean, if you think back to the last four or five weeks, we had, poor cabin had to drive to Springfield, Ohio to investigate the possibility that they're eating

the pets. You've had now a representative, U.S. representative of a Republican, put out a statement, long statement, several pages, couple pages, debunking a long string of conspiracies about the storm and its effects, starting with the idea that the government controls the weather and cause this. The kinds of things that are part of the national discussion right now being pushed by people who know better leaves you pretty sad about kind of where we are and worried about where we're going in the next month and month plus. But I think the interesting contrast here

is what you've heard from sort of the right-wing infotainment world, which is sort of an high dudgeon with its condemnation of the Biden administration and claims that everything is a mess and a mess because of a lack of preparation. And contrast that with what you've heard from local leaders who are almost to a person saying the opposite, regardless of political party. I mean, you've had very strong supporter of Donald Trump, Governor McMaster in South Carolina saying this. You've had Roy Cooper in North Carolina who's a Democrat saying this.

You've had local officials saying this, talking in specifics about how important it was to have pre-stationed certain assets to respond to the, to the, to the, crisis. Now that doesn't mean that there weren't mistakes made. Of course there were. Anything of this magnitude there would be. And it doesn't mean that there might emerge real points of criticism of what the Biden administration either did or didn't do in advance. But I think the fact that these attacks were so quickly, and I think authoritatively pushed back on by, as I say, people of both political parties and the fact that some of the attacks were connected with these crazy conspiracies just makes them less politically potent, if you will. Well, can I make one point?

Actually, let me go back to something that you and Kevin were talking about because I think this is going to matter. This is going to be a big point of discussion between now and up to the election, probably beyond the election, and that's this question of Trump voters in North Carolina and what's going to happen here. Chris Lasavita and Susie Wiles, top two campaign officials for the Trump campaign wrote a long letter urging the governor of North Carolina and the Assembly to take a series of steps to accommodate Trump voters who might have difficulty. Trump voters in the affected areas, while all voters, they didn't just say Trump voters, but it's obvious that they're most concerned about Trump voters because they run the Trump campaign, take a series of steps to accommodate those voters given the fact. that there's been this disruption in polling places,

in election officials in the lives of the Trump voters themselves. I haven't studied it carefully, but on a quick glance, it reads to me like, you know, reasonably sane requests for some accommodation of people, you know, are going to have trouble voting. I just raised that to point out, however, that so much of what we heard about the 2020 stolen election was directly related to claims from the Trump campaign that any

such accommodations for the pandemic for people either not able or not willing to go vote in the middle of a panic were necessarily voter fraud. And I do think, you know, it feels almost like way too naive to ask people to give little grace at a moment like this, but this has been a devastating storm. I think it is worth taking a moment and saying, you know what, this is going to cause real problems for people voting. And I think some accommodations are appropriate. We should want people to vote. We should want people to vote regardless of who they're going to vote for. So I think it does make some sense to take seriously these requests from the Trump campaign and say, hey, how can we make it easier for all

voters who might have difficulty voting to vote now. I just wish that the two parties would approach these things in a more even-handed way. Yeah, I mean, the idea that the government can control the weather used to be such a insane fringe thing. It was like something you could laugh about as the example of the insane fringe thing. And now, you know, there's a story in Rolling Stone today. I'll just read you the headline. Meteorologists get death threats as hurricane Milton conspiracy theories thrive and they say their number one email topic that

they're getting is this idea that the government controls the weather and therefore they're not predicting the weather as meteorologists they're sicking disasters onto people based on their political affiliations which is a honestly a sad and terrifying thing for people

to believe. Since we were talking about competence and predictions that was in Rolling Stone so 50 cents it actually happened 50% is too high for me on that one. Okay, I want to start not worth your time a little earlier in this episode because I have a feeling that Steve may think it's worth our time. So Steve, a few mornings ago, CBS's morning show had Tennessee coats on as a guest to talk about his new book, which has been roundly praised.

as beautifully written and very impressionistic emotional take on his trip to Israel and seeing the conflict in Gaza quasi firsthand. It has also been widely criticized for never mentioning Hamas' attacks on Israel, I mean, any number of facts, whether he thinks the state of Israel should exist. You certainly come away from the book thinking probably not. So he comes into this interview, and Tony DocuPill asked him a series of pressing questions. When I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.

Why does Tanahashi Coates, who I've known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And if you haven't seen the interview, the questions are blunt, certainly critical. He also asks all of the questions. So you do start to feel a little uncomfortable as a viewer, I would say.

at the same time, boy, they were questions that I found really penetrating and interesting, and I wanted the answers to them as soon as I heard those questions, anytime someone writes a book, why didn't you include this? What did you think your audience needed to know and didn't need to know? You know, you can't include everything in every book, for instance, but at the same time, some facts just seem so relevant to the crisis that's going on there, you know, every piece deal rejected by Hamas, every time Hamas has attacked Israel, started wars that they've then lost, you know, yada, yada, yada. So what happens afterwards is that Tony DocuPill, the journalist in that case,

is called out by CBS standards for violating their journalistic standards. It's not totally clear what the problem was. We're now hearing that maybe it was his tone and body language. At the same time, Tennessee Coates then went on a podcast and said he thought it was a real shame that the other two interviewers didn't get to ask him questions because Gail King had told him some of what she wanted to ask and they were good questions, which of course is a little weird because then the journalist who asked the hard questions got reprimanded, but the journalist who maybe gave her questions to the interview subject in advance didn't violate their journalistic

standards. And, you know, Tony Dockypill is Jewish, so then there was a question of bias. But Gail King had done any number of interviews after George Floyd that were certainly just as representing a viewpoint on that news situation as well. So Steve, what is happening to journalism if hard questions get you called into the principal's office? Yeah, I mean, you laid that out very well. There is, we'll leave this as a separate sort of follow-on discussion, but we should mention that CBS is now also being scrutinized for having potentially deceptively edited the interview that 60 Minutes did with Kamala Harris using some of her answers in a way that made it seem like she was more responsive to the questions than she, in fact, was.

And this has certainly been a big deal in Trump world with Donald Trump, even once again questioning the license of CBS News. So separate question, let me answer your first question first. I mean, I think it's a scandal. I think it's absolutely appalling that the interviewer was subject to this kind of, I mean, it wasn't public, but it was on a call, it was on a CBS News call, which was then, the contents of then were leaked. And he was sort of braked over the coals for, I think, what was a very, not only a good interview, let me just, it's entirely appropriate. I don't even think there's really much of a discussion that if you have somebody like Tana C. Coates,

who's written a book like Tana Cicote has written, which by all accounts, I think, even the people who praised the book for its elegant writing, would acknowledge that it selectively used information to be gentle in the critique. It's absolutely not only appropriate, but necessary to ask questions about that. When you elide important facts about Hamas

and about the origins of the conflict. A journalist has an obligation to ask those questions. And if you're not asking those questions, it's not journalism. So entirely fair to ask those questions. People can debate the tone, but let's just say, you know, there's not a lot of naval gazing or second guessing from CBS executives when somebody grills, you know, Paul Ryan on his entitlement reform package in a super aggressive way.

Let's use the example of the Israeli father whose child was being held hostage. And Gail King very much grilled him on why he didn't have that same compassion for Palestinian children when he was on the show. I think that's a pretty one-to-one example of like, well, we weren't toned policing then. But now this seems to be all about politics.

What do you say about that? You know, you have innocent children and Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying. And no one seems to be able to say, Enough. Stop that. I'm not interested in politics at all. My only concern is getting Emily Beck.

And by the way, I thought that was also journalism, right? Like, I didn't like it, but okay. But then, and it's funny, because you go watch the interview with DocuPill and Coates, and the whole time he's sort of almost part of what makes it uncomfortable is that DocuPill is falling over himself to say how much he likes him, how much he respects him. You know, the reason I'm pressing you is because I respect you so much.

I look forward to having dinner with you again. You've been to my house. Like, it actually would have been less uncomfortable if he hadn't been trying so hard to have a friendly tone because it was a morning show. And yet, he's getting tone policed? Yeah, I mean, I do think it, you know,

I'm not a daily viewer of the CBS morning show. But I think if you have seen the clips or followed Tony Docupil's career, he's a center-left guy. I mean, I don't think there's really any debate about that. And I think that was why, I mean, in part, that's why he fell over himself to say like, hey, I'm not normally, you know, I'm with you on a lot of stuff. But just not on this.

Let me ask you some tough questions on this. I do think to move to the second question, I didn't like Gayle King's interview of the Israeli parents. I agree with you that it was journalism. I think it was bad journalism. I didn't like it, but I didn't want her to get called into the tone police either. Certainly not.

Certainly not. I think the answer is for people to switch the channels if they didn't like it. I mean, that's the way this should work. But I thought it was bad journalism. I didn't think she did a very good job. The fact that it's emerged that she provided coats with, and we don't know the specifics, right? So we don't know that she said, we're going to give, I'm going to ask you this specific question.

It sounds like maybe she said, I'm, you know, talking about his book. I'm going to ask you about this part of your book. I'm going to ask you about this part of your book. I'm going to ask you about this part of your book. Yeah, saying, hey, I'm really interested to talk to you about the chapter where you mentioned visiting this site. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that unless you're doing it as a way to coach, right?

Unless you're saying, hey, I want to talk to you about this because I want you to be prepared to answer that. Yeah, purpose matters. And you might not be prepared otherwise, which I think sucks. Like, that's not journalism. That's bad journalism. All in all, I think this is a big black eye for CBS. It's yet another example.

of why even mainstream conservatives have been so frustrated with the media. And this has been a problem going on long before the Donald Trump moment. And I think it's one of the reasons that Donald Trump has so effectively turned Republicans and conservatives against the media in the manner that he has, which I think has been grossly irresponsible. But there was a reason that conservatives and Republicans

were skeptical of the media to begin with. And Trump took advantage of that. So, Kevin, I have two things about this. One, do you want to talk about the 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Harris and the editing that they did? And how we deal with that? Because on the one hand, all 60 minute interviews, I say all, they're all taped to some extent. There's a thing called live to tape, meaning, yeah, you're not watching it live like you might be on a morning show or something. But when they taped it a few days ago, they just hit play, they hit stop.

and that whole thing goes on TV. So it's live to tape. So it's not live to you, the audience, but you're watching everything that happened. But that's unusual, frankly. Most of the time, you tape an hour-long interview and you're trying to take out the parts that were interesting for viewers

because they don't want to watch the boring parts. And how are we supposed to judge when editing is okay versus not okay in an interview with the vice president? I'll come back to that in a second. But three thoughts on. on the earlier question. One, it's always interesting to see a TV weasel,

try to do some journalism. So when Doc Pills out there doing his thing, it's, you never know how that's going to work out. Second, I was heartened to see that Sherry Redstone, who was the chairman over there, took the side of the journalist in this manner, and heapsed scorn upon his critics, and I thought that was a good sign.

Third, and most important is that during my brief career at the Atlantic, one of the things that I learned for sure that my former colleague, Tony E.C. Coates, is definitely not worth my time. So that'll be the end of that discussion. Editing is a funny thing, right? So we've all gone through this as print journalists, right? That you talk to people, you do interviews, you write down or record what they say, but you don't put their quotes in there exactly the way they're saying.

You take out the ums and the ayes and things like that. And now there's a couple of different ways to do that, right? You can edit people's quotes in a way that makes them look dumb, or you can edit people's quotes in a way that makes them look better. There's editing for clarity. There's editing for good journalistic purposes. And then there's editing that's for the purposes of public relations and propaganda and such. So I don't know what 60 Minutes did in this particular case because I haven't seen the raw footage versus what they actually put out.

It would be interesting to put those things outside by side. And I think that kind of actually really ought to be short of a standard journalistic practice. when you're doing these sort of long interviews to someone who's running for president? Right, you may not have time to put them all on your broadcast, but you certainly have the server bandwidth to put them all online

so that other journalists can look at it and people can judge for themselves if they want to take the hour to watch the whole interview, feel free. But here's the highlights that we thought, you know, were worth 10 minutes of your time. Yeah, I mean, we've seen like, you know, I mean, we're looking at malicious edits.

It's a shame that Jonah isn't here, right? Because he had a really great example of that when he was on was at The Daily Show. where they just did a real, we had a job on having names on there. And I think that's the story I'm thinking of, I know he had a case of just really, really bad edits at one point. Where, for instance, there was just a camera on him

while they were setting up, you know, and he's not talking, and then they ask a question of him, and then they just use that video, that Tim sitting there going, had nothing to do with the question. It was just to make him look bad. Sorry if I'm slandering the Daily Show here, although I think it was the Daily Show.

And if not, they kind of deserve to be slandered a little bit, so that's probably all right. I just kind of, I know I'm talking to two people here who do a lot of television commentary and I do a little bit myself from time to time. I just don't think television news is worth a damn. I just don't think it is. I don't think 60 minutes is any good. I don't think the CBS evening news is any good.

I don't think any of these shows are really very good. Television news is super useful when you have a 9-11 or something like that where you need to put a camera on something that's happening so people can see it. I just don't think it's very good. I think that television news is barely news. You know, something that, Sarah, you've talked about a lot. You talked about it in our dispatch promotional reel I saw the other day, which is the devolution of news and journalism into entertainment.

But this really starts and comes from television. The New York Times, I read the New York Times every day, and I can tell you this newspaper is not trying very hard to be entertaining. It's the driest, most boring, dust in your mouth, kind of, you know, journalistic tone you'll ever find, which is a good way to cloak your biases, of course, just to make everything look dry and scientific and obvious. But television's a whole different story.

I just don't like it. So I find it difficult to care very much about 60 minutes. Every time one of these stories comes up, I'm reminded, huh, 60 minutes still exists. And I don't think I've watched it since 1988, probably, something like that. It's been a while. Yes, I was that kind of nerdy high school sophomore.

You know, I have to say, as I said, I think that what CBS has done here is a genuine scandal as it relates to the time I see Coates interview. and the Gail King questions potentially would like to learn a little bit more about that. I think we need to learn a little bit more about the editing of the 60 Minutes tape, but I don't think it's a good look.

I will say that the complaints that we're getting from sort of Trump world and in particular the Fox News opinion slingers are a little tough to take, right? I mean, is it really the case that you're going to go into full outrage if you work in Fox News primetime about some editing mistakes.

Remember, Fox edited out Tucker Carlson's, big chunks of Tucker Carlson's interview with Guy, Kanye West, where he said things that were grossly anti-Semitic, and then not only were those parts of the interview edited out, Tucker fronted the interview, as John McCormick reported in his profile of Tucker a couple weeks ago, that he is not a crazy person, even though the interview,

if you read more of it, makes pretty clear that he is a crazy person. So I think it's a bit rich for those reasons. There was also an incident earlier this summer where Fox and Friends Weekend interviewed Donald Trump, and they asked a question about declassifying the intelligence file, on, you know, wide variety of sort of conspiracy,

the outer space stuff, I think, and some others. And asked about Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump's view, if I'm paraphrasing it or correctly, was in effect, yeah, I want to declassify all that. Maybe not the Epstein stuff as much, because, you know, if there's fake stuff in there, phony stuff, you wouldn't want to get people in trouble if fake stuff came out in that release.

So, you know, maybe not as much. And they just cut that out. They just cut that out of the interview. So, you know, there's selective editing that takes place. There's also an ad that the Trump campaign is running, or at least I want to be careful if I'm making the accusation, campaign promoting Donald Trump at the very least, in which a woman who appeared in an NMSNBC focus group

about gun violence had made some comments about inflation. she's a Harris, Kamala Harris, supporter. And those comments were taken out of that interview and plugged into a Trump ad suggesting that she, you know, hinting that she is for Donald Trump and not Kamala Harris because she has these concerns about inflation. So it's a bit rich to have the people who have been dishonestly manipulating media for as long as people in Trump world have

to be complaining about this. You know, inflation always comes into the gun violence conversation, though, because if you've priced ammunition recently, it is just outrageous. So I guess I want to end a little bit thinking on trends in media because four years ago, three years ago, we were seeing quite a bit of these sort of newsroom struggle sessions. And I'm certainly thinking of the New York Times after the Tom Cotton op-ed, I think is the number one example. But, you know, my own experience at CNN is out there, and it was this idea that these senior executives were beholden to their young, very woke, very, very left-wing staff that wasn't representative of their viewers, let alone America, let alone journalistic goals and ethics. And I felt like we had moved past that, that they had learned that Twitter wasn't real life. that their newsroom staff wasn't representative and that they needed to be the adults in the room

and make their own decisions. And we hadn't had really a situation like the docu-pill struggle session for a year or two, I thought. And I think this is hitting me pretty hard because it means that it was just sort of mostly coincidental that we hadn't had one of those. And in fact, we're very much still going to do struggle sessions

when truth hurts one side politically more than the other, that we're still doing activism, not journalism, let's see where it goes. I'm a curious person, and I just want to ask questions. Well, and it must be said, you know, CBS is a solution to this, to this quote-unquote problem, and I don't know whether it actually happened. I haven't read anything, maybe one of you knows,

but was to bring in a DEI specialist for sort of a group therapy session the next morning. Oh, let me tell you what happens, Steve. I'm so excited to tell you how that story ended because they announced, well, his name leaked. Correct. And you will be shocked to hear that on his Instagram were a series of wildly partisan, embarrassing, racially offensive things. He had referred to Tim Scott as Uncle Tim. That was sort of the least of it.

Anyway, so they had the struggle session, but uninvited the DEI guy. Yeah, but uninvited him only because they got busted because it emerged that he was the guy who was going to lead this struggle session. No, it's pretty appalling. I mean, people are going to, you know, what's been interesting is actually CBS has taken steps over the past several years to bring in some Fox News refugees to because I think they have seen. as a network that part of the getable market is many of the people who are members and subscribers of the dispatch, sort of sane, politically homeless, many of them center right people, but who want facts and want news. So CBS, as much as any of the networks, had made some attempts to try to get those people, to try to win over those viewers. They hired Catherine Herridge from Fox.

She has since departed and become a critic of the network, but they brought in some producers Finn Gomez, who was a very good producer at Fox News, went to CBS, and I believe he's now the White House Bureau Chief or a senior White House producer. He may be the Washington Bureau Chief now, but they brought in some producers and others from Fox, who I think were smart and saying also in their sort of personnel and management levels, really smart people, really good people. And I thought it was a good move, if largely undetected. You know, Whatever strides they made by doing that and by taking seriously a fact-interested center-right audience, you have something like this that is so ham-handed and so gross, you know, the average viewers are going to say, like, I'm not going there for my news, and it'll be hard to blame them. We also now have reporting that CBS has instructed its journalists, do not refer to Jerusalem as being part of Israel.

It is the capital of Israel, for those who are curious. Anyway, with that, I can't believe Kevin hasn't given us his prediction with $5,000 behind it. But fair enough, Kevin, be chicken if you want. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He did a pretty good job. I mean, I think, you know, we don't want to do like real-time reviews. But for somebody who came in cranky and, you know, wouldn't even say hello at the opening thing because he wasn't chatty, it's pretty good effort. Pretty good effort.

I wouldn't say cranky. I would say I was being sober. I was bringing gravitas. We appreciate the gravitas. Somebody asked. I mean, I got to say, you're under a boil water with four kids under three and triplets. Like, you can be as cranky as you want, sir.

You know, Desani, smart water. You can make formula out of it as it turns out. It just makes formula. I hate Desani. I think it tastes terrible. I like Ozark. Desani's terrible. We shouldn't be...

Desani may be the only thing he can get, so... How many choices did you drive at my local grocery store? Yes, okay, fair. It tastes better than amoebas. We love Desani right now. We love Desani right now for you. I went into big lots.

Five minutes actually the announcement was made and bought all the water off the shelves and that's what we got. Yeah, smart water is actually really good. Not as good as Fiji But isn't Fiji is supposed to be the dirtiest of all the waters? No, I think it's supposed to be the cleanest. I don't know.

Right? I think the testing has suggested that it's the cleanest. It certainly is the best. No, the Ozark water that you buy in bulk in Texas, that's the best stuff. Wow. No way. Texas homerism to end? Wow.

Hard to imagine. Periodic from Wideruderducera is not really from Texas. What do you mean I'm not really from Texas? That's right. Right. You're not from Texas. You can see it from there. From Richmond Rosenberg? Excuse me?

All right. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you all next week. That's right. You're not for Texas. That's right. You're not for Texas. Texas won't you anyway.

That's right. You're not for Texas. That's right. You're not for Texas. That's right. You're not for Texas. Texas wants you anyway.