Decades ago, when the media wasn’t held in the same contempt as, say, bounty hunters or ambulance-chasing lawyers, at some point during August, bored reporters, year after year, would invoke the “silly season” cliché, meaning that newspapers, with column inches to fill, might print trivial stories, on the front page, about “a hot restaurant in San Jose” or “25 ways to maximize your time at the beach.” Little notice was taken by readers, who, perhaps taking it easy themselves, would slip into the baseball box scores or check out “Gasoline Alley,” “Winnie Winkle” and “Mary Worth,” or, if in the New York metro area, the New York Post’s “Page Six.”
As I’ve written many times in the post-literacy era, which accelerated around 2010, now it’s “silly season” every day of the year, much to the dismay of the dwindling number of men and women who cover Important Matters, mostly Beltway-centric, and probably from the comfort of their homes. On Monday morning I saw a pair of idiotic notices on X/Twitter, the first from Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough. He said: “We've officially entered the silly season when people I have read and respected all across the ideological spectrum are shaming themselves, trying to flatten this race out and trying to make Donald Trump seem normal next to Kamala Harris." I’ve no idea what Joe was getting on about, but suppose it was simply another no-questions-asked donation to Kamala’s campaign.
Silver lining: it reminded me that two weeks after the election (unless Trump and Kamala are tied up in court) the Political Class will begin handicapping the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential hopefuls. In a country that’s not upside-down, mass layoffs would decimate that profession: pollsters, consultants and extraneous “horserace” reporters out on their ears. A job’s a job, and maybe that’s a harsh sentiment, but I’d guess there’s still work for the axed in the advertising industry. And, as an advocate of a flat tax, the thought of accountants and tax lawyers becoming “redundant” doesn’t bother me. Politics has always been, at most levels, an entertaining cultural diversion, but has any year topped 2024 as Chicago White Sox-like absurdity?
The media’s making a stink about Kamala snubbing the Al Smith Dinner in NYC on Oct. 17th. So what? That’s 20th-century political thinking, and won’t cost her a vote: considering her incomprehensible ramble with Oprah last week, it’s the smart choice for the Kamala campaign. And though I was at first disappointed there won’t—at this juncture—be another Kamala-Trump debate, on reflection that doesn’t matter much either. Voters are ironclad in their choices, and to me the only real question is how many Americans just skip Election Day altogether.
Semafor’s Ben Smith, in that site’s newsletter had this doozy about the inconsequential Bobby Jr./Olivia Nuzzi revelations, a “story” that for those inclined, was worth two minutes of bare-bones titillation, although supposedly more earth-shaking to Guardians of the Media, who faked concern about Nuzzi crossing ethical boundaries, as if that doesn’t happen every single day in reporting about finance, war and politics. He wrote:
“I had hoped to avoid writing about last week’s big media scandal. We were scooped… by Oliver Darcy’s excellent new newsletter, Status, after we ignored a Wednesday evening email from one “Anderson Jones.” Jones, an anonymous sender with an Iowa IP address who has since gone dark, had a “news tip”: New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi had disclosed to Vox she’d had a romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But now that we are in the full fury of American media prurience and self-righteousness, I am going to risk my neck on a slightly contrarian view.
But we’re also in the business of trust, as well as truth. And for those purposes, the appearance of conflict is, in fact, bad enough. It undermines reasonable people’s trust, and there’s no real defense for that. And so before I have to hand over my editor’s badge, I should mention that our policy here at Semafor is that if you’re having a romantic relationship with a subject of your coverage, for the love of God tell your editor.”
God has no interest in the peccadillos of American politics, or Semafor.
Had Smith really “hoped to avoid” writing about this “big media scandal,” he could’ve exercised free will and avoided it. Perhaps he’d feel less soiled this week. And “the full fury of American media prurience and self-righteousness” applies to, ballpark number, 150 of Smith’s “besties.” A Kennedy in a compromising situation with a younger woman, who happens to be a reporter: who gives a shit? Shohei Ohtani’s magnificence this season and the Detroit Tigers playoff run is far more compelling to me, just as other Americans have topics given priority over the “sexts” of a 70-year-old man (who’ll likely get a “sayonara” from Trump should the latter win the election) and a reporter that almost no one reads. (That’s not a knock on Nuzzi: just the reality that her former outlet, New York, is in George, Talk or Egg magazine territory; the gravity of her reporting is many rungs below the “importance” of political scientist/actor George Clooney.)
And who, exactly, is trying to murder Trump? If it’s still possible to be alarmed by the government’s actions, the release of Ryan Routh’s “manifesto” just six weeks before the election is crazy. The story of Routh is legitimate, but details could’ve been revealed in late-December when copycat fame-seekers would move on to other targets. Then again, as The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger writes (before the Routh dump), the second snuff attempt was just another day in America. Henninger: “The first Trump shooting, in Butler, Pa., was a mega-event, with the nation glued to TV screens for hours [hyperbole, I think]. This one in Florida was a duck-in-duck-out affair [on a] Sunday to see if there was anything new, such as: Did they catch anyone? And what the heck ever happened to the Secret Service? Back to the NFL.”
Paraphrasing that musty slogan from the 1960s, What If They Gave An Election and Nobody Came?
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023