One Word, Six Days, No Argument

On Tuesday the President described Democratic candidates in the coming midterms as “jihadists,” in remarks widely understood as aimed at Abdul El-Sayed, who had just won a primary nomination in Michigan. By Thursday the word had generated a full news cycle. By Sunday it had generated nothing else.

Trace the six days and you find a machine running exactly as designed. Day one: the remark, clipped and posted. Day two: the reaction, which is where most of the audience actually encounters it — not as a statement but as other people being appalled by a statement. Day three: the meta-cycle, in which the coverage of the reaction becomes the story, and the phrase “sparks backlash” appears in eleven headlines. Day four: the defense, which does not defend the word but attacks the coverage of the word. Day five: a poll. Day six: nothing, because a new thing has happened.

What is missing from all six days is an argument. Not a rebuttal — those were plentiful, loud and largely correct. An argument: a claim about what a candidate believes, tested against what the candidate has said, and settled or not settled in public. That takes two people who intend to remain in the room. The cycle does not have a room. It has a feed, and a feed's only requirement is that you stay in it, which is best achieved by a sensation that does not resolve.

There is a real Islamophobia story here and it is serious and it deserves reporting that outlasts a week — the kind that counts how often this rhetoric has appeared from elected officials this cycle, and asks the people it describes what it has cost them. Some outlets did that. It moved slower and traveled less far than the clip, which is not a moral failure of any journalist and is simply the physics of the medium.

The uncomfortable part, and the reason this paper exists: I watched all six days. I did not have to. Nothing in day two through day six informed a single decision I will make in November. I could have read the primary result on Tuesday, read one careful piece on Sunday, and been better informed than I am now, with five days back.

Since early August the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz has been imminent, conditional, imminent again, and then subject to a new demand for compensation that had not previously been part of any framework.

Each turn produced a headline containing the word “breakthrough” or the word “collapse,” and no turn produced a document.

Readers deserve one honest sentence, so here it is: nobody covering this from a studio knows what will happen, the people who do know are not talking to studios, and a story with a live shooting war attached should be read once a day from a wire service and not once an hour from a panel.

The drawer test was run from Friday evening to Sunday evening. On Sunday he read a summary of everything he had missed. It took eleven minutes and contained one item he would have wanted sooner.

Forty-eight hours of anxiety, exchanged for eleven minutes and one item. He is running it again this weekend.