The Signal Leak Story Sent Me Back
Politics is an endless cycle of controversy and outrage these days. Protect your well-being by understanding when a story has reached its terminus, even if it's still generating noise.
Like everyone else, I’ve read more than I’d care to admit about the now infamous Houthi group chat the last few days. It’s the perfect news story: equal parts horror, schadenfreude and unintentional slapstick, with smoking gun evidence to boot.
First time seeing the intimate chats of the country’s top officials discussing an impending military strike? Check. With social awkwardness, and fist and fire emojis thrown in? Yep.
I’ll let the national security experts continue to weigh-in on the many legal and political issues with using Signal this way. But as a journalist, this news cycle really brought me back to the first Trump administration.
During that era, every day or two seemed to bring a fresh scandal, controversy, or outrage in Washington: a new norm violated; rule broken; precedent violated; social grace or tradition eschewed. Some of these stories felt as significant as the Signal story does now; others drew attention more for their symbolism and style, or their overt outrageousness, than their gravity.
The rapid pace of this news cycle was a bonanza, sending reporters racing with the president’s first tweets early in the morning, and drawing the eyeballs of riveted and horrified news consumers around the world. All of it added up to a boom in subscriptions and readership for top news organizations. Suddenly there was one story that was so loud every day that it would drown out everything else. If it was big enough, the cycle could last a week. But then it would fade, washed away by the next controversy as if it had never happened.
Just to list a few of these: the “shithole” countries affair, critical intelligence revealed to Russians in the Oval Office, Trump posing with Navajo codebreakers in front of Andrew Jackson’s portrait, and on. There was a whole website created to capture the dizzying pace of news and scandals: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?
The site is still active today, and I did a brief dive into its archives for old times’ sake. The dusty news stories from Trump I, snapshots from these sagas, are almost incomprehensible now. Check out this one from CNN during some scandal that I only vaguely remember now, where Devin Nunes accused intelligence officials of picking up Trump’s communications. “Who cleared Devin Nunes into the White House?”. It felt like one of the biggest things going on, at the time, and is nearly meaningless, today.
I don’t know exactly how this Signal chat story will play out, but I wouldn’t put my money on any significant changes or consequences. Unless Republicans in Congress start exerting pressure on the White House, which they haven’t shown any appetite so far. In a week or two, the news cycle will have moved on to some other fire.
When the new administration came in in 2021, I consciously felt the pull to deprogram myself after four years of these type of news stories. As both a journalist and a news consumer, I felt like I had been used.
Used by politicians who courted the types of controversies that used to end careers — creating an unintentionally symbiotic relationship between critical coverage and their messaging. Used by media organizations that played up those scandals for engagement and clicks. And taken advantage of as a reporter to chase these small scandals almost every day, even though we came to see that they all led the same place: nowhere, but with more yelling. The story, if you step back, is almost always the same.
So this is all to say — yes it’s a big story. Yes it matters. But it’s also ok to close your laptop after a few days of the media circus, because there will be something else next week.
Here’s what else I’m reading right now:
An interesting piece from The Verge on how — and when — the government can SEARCH YOUR CELL PHONE during travel.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, formerly of The Intercept, was sharply critical of Atlantic EIC’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s decision to only selectively disclose texts from the HOUTHI CHAT. Goldberg noted in the piece that he withheld material that was related to intelligence operations or could harm U.S. security interests from publication. Klippenstein felt like this was overly accommodating given the potential news worthiness of the info, calling it “one of the worst cases of media paternalism, what I call highchair journalism.”
His critique stood in contrast to many capital E establishment journalists, who praised Goldberg’s restraint.
Poynter noted that Goldberg’s decision to leave the confidential chat voluntarily wasn’t “a bad call, but it wasn’t clear-cut either.”
Knowing how much the administration might relish going after a journalist like Goldberg for sharing classified information, legal concerns were likely also a major motivating factor.
MANAGERS PUBLICLY BLAMING “underperforming” workers for their own layoffs, seen recently at Facebook, strikes me as a potential new trend, and is a sign of how widely the philosophy — or pseudo-philosophy ;) — of Darwinian labor relations is taking hold. Fintech company Block CEO Jack Dorsey was the latest to strike this chord, albeit in a much more low-key way than Zuckerberg, saying about 460 of the company’s 931 layoffs this week were related to performance. Dorsey also said the layoffs were not specifically about the company’s finances. My take: it feels gratuitous to throw people under the bus, even subtly, as they re-enter the jobs market. And of course, it might just be a convenient way to deflect blame for a company’s underperformance — or deny a company is underperforming at all.
Last week we cited poll guru David Shor’s conclusion that young voters, particularly men, swung in “UNPRECEDENTED” numbers to Trump. This week, Colby sociology professor Neil Gross, who is armed with some alternative data, disagreed with that analysis. His take: that MAGA voters were fired up should not necessarily be construed for growth. “The data suggest that the swing in young adults voting for Donald Trump did not reflect a major shift in ideology,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Rather, the swing seems to have resulted from moderate-to-somewhat-liberal young voters deciding to bet on Mr. Trump out of concern about the state of the economy — and from young moderates and progressives who chose to stay home because they thought Ms. Harris was either too progressive or not progressive enough.” Gross cited some fresh data that showed that the number of folks between 18 and 29 who identify as conservative has held relatively steady over the last 20 years, at around a quarter of the population — including recently.
BERNIE SANDERS AND AOC are drawing big crowds across the country, as Democrats work to find their footing again. “Their rallies are bigger than any other events currently being held by Democrats, and party figures of all stripes are taking notice,” Politico reports. Semafor noted that neither Sanders or AOC are talking up Biden much, which is not surprising. Maybe some day Biden will get some credit for the marriage he helped broker between the party’s progressive wing and centrists, and the domestic policy achievements that followed, but for the moment, nobody on the left is happy about how things ended up.
FORMER FACEBOOK EMPLOYEE Sabhanaz Rashid Diya has a critical take on the new memoir Careless People. She calls it “disappointing and revealing, for the same reason: It exposes how Facebook’s leadership, including Wynn-Williams, was complicit in enabling the company’s monopolistic, profiteering, and harmful practices under the guise of doing something good for the world or ‘teaching politicians’ to use social media. It does not reveal anything new…”
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