Kamala Harris will name her choice for vice president today. Because American politics is essentially sports for the athletically disinclined, the bookies have Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulling slightly ahead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as the betting favorite, and that’s considered a news story.
A couple of bad days for the stock markets was all it took for the business press to churn out its perennially favorite story: We might be heading for a recession. Here’s why I ignore most stories about what might happen: a 12% drop in Japan’s stock index last week triggered all this. On Monday, Japan’s stock index jumped 11%. Oh, well, be very afraid anyway, I guess.
In news of things that actually happened, Google lost an antitrust case over its search-engine dominance. As the judge wrote, “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” Even Google’s advertising-at-the-top algorithm had to let that one through.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer worries that the story about the $10 million bribe the Egyptians gave Trump is being quickly forgotten. As Paul Campos noted over at LGM, the media barely reports on any Trump outrage anymore. People don’t click on those stories because nothing Trump does surprises them.
That Trump is openly bribing billionaires by promising to sell them the government and that he’s praising Putin for kidnapping Americans is at least getting a little bit of media attention, although hardly anything commensurate with the enormity of these acts. By contrast, at the end of his rally Saturday night Trump asked Georgia’s governor to intervene to drop the criminal case against him in that state, and this isn’t even being reported, because apparently that’s just Trump being Trump, plus there’s the dead bear cub that RFK was going to eat, and Simone Biles fell off the balance beam, and stocks are way down this morning so maybe you should rebalance your portfolio, and on and on and on (puts on Sinatra and starts to cry).
The press is doggedly pursuing a story they want to be true, though. Josh Marshall points out that they’re reporting that the Harris honeymoon is over despite there being no evidence to support this claim. They’re simply trying to wish – and propagandize – it into being.
The floor’s yours.