Conservative: News Media Share Blame for All the Rage
A lot of journalists are casting themselves as heroic victims in the wake of the mail-bomb attempts, but The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis is concerned that “we are actually part of the problem.” Because while President Trump “has abdicated his responsibility” to serve as a uniting force, “there is some merit to his claim” that the news media contribute to “the current climate of fear and anger.” Cable news, along with social media, the Internet and talk radio, are “frequently a shout-fest that brings more heat than light — more passion than illumination.” It doesn’t just report on bad or depressing things, “we hype them” and then “bring on people to fight about the provocative topics.” It’s “a relentless, 24/7 barrage of negativity” and anger — and it may literally be driving some people crazy.
Urban critic: Subway Chief Blames the Messenger
New York City Transit President Andy Byford is up against a problem that City Journal’s Nicole Gelinas calls “more intractable than fixing subway infrastructure”: dealing with the often-mentally-ill homeless people who use the transit system for shelter. But while he “deserves kudos” for publicly acknowledging the problem and offering “a welcome change to New York’s enforcement policy,” he was much “less admirable” in blaming the New York Post reporter “who accurately covered the story.” Faced with criticism from homeless advocates, Byford angrily “blamed the messenger.” But while Byford genuinely desires to “deliver cleaner, more inviting subway stations,” he appears averse “to making the hard choices necessary for that to happen.” Ultimately, though, “he can’t have it both ways.”
Foreign desk: Egypt’s Exiles Are Especially Terrified
Like the rest of the world, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi is carefully watching Washington’s response to the Jamal Khashoggi killing. If the United States only punishes Saudi Arabia lightly, warns Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, “El-Sisi will see it as permission to go after dissidents living abroad.” Indeed, he notes, “even before Khashoggi’s murder, the regime pushed boundaries with its harassment of exiled dissidents,” to the point where they “now must carefully consider how much, or even whether, to go abroad.” In places like Turkey, one dissident warns, “things can be made to look like an accident.” So where for President Trump, the response to Khashoggi’s death “is about balancing US values and interests,” for Egyptian dissidents it’s “a matter of life and death.”
From the right: Why the Caravan Matters
Granted, the 7,000 Central American migrants now headed for the US border don’t actually amount to a hill of beans against the huge number of those — 300,000 apprehended at the southern border in 2017— who enter the country each year. But The Weekly Standard’s Ethan Epstein argues that the “caravan does matter,” as a “useful synecdoche” for the biggest current issue in global politics: migration. The leaders of the United States, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Australia and Israel, among others, all adhere to “one fundamental principle”: that a nation and its citizens “determine who enters it.” The caravan represents those who argue that migrants “have a right to enter the United States, irrespective of the laws, customs or wishes of America.” Some, like many Democrats and journalists, wish it would go away because “they would rather not reveal which side they’re on.”
Senators: Giving Americans a Break at the Pharmacy
It’s not often, suggest Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Kan.) at The Washington Post, that you hear about a proposal to lower prescription costs that’s supported by 76 percent of Americans as well as doctors and insurers. Yet that’s what’s happening with their bipartisan bill requiring drug companies to “disclose list prices for their medications in direct-to-consumer television advertisements.” Today’s ads, they note, “boost sales and profit margins by steering patients to the most expensive brand-name drug.” Indeed, they ask, “have you ever seen a Super Bowl ad for a low-cost generic drug?” But adding list prices to TV ads “is the transparency needed to allow market forces to work.” Fact is, “it will boost competition and help Americans struggling with outrageously high and skyrocketing drug costs.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
