The Memory, Whole. Key News Updates
The start of a weekly feature, two years in the making, to keep you grounded
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It’s not every day you get to gather up your thoughts and ground yourself before diving into an absolute shitstorm.
But it is every Monday here, starting now.
I’ve been toying with this idea in some form or another for more than two years now, and I think I finally have the proper home for it. I’ve been covering the Trump shitstorm for a decade now, and I had plenty of experience with political shitsplosions before, but it used to be you had a chance to slow down at some point, take a breath and figure out what you just witnessed.
It sure *seems* like every day, every minute brings an exhausting new emergency in the second and final term of President Trump. Of course most of it is just bluster and “TACO” filling, while some of it really is DefCon 1 for America — extraordinary renditions from domestic soil to a South American gulag, the elevation of Tammany Hall-style corruption to the White House, mass firings, expansive new taxes levied with political war in mind and nonstop attacks on the First Amendment right to free speech. (I’m sure I missed a few.)
Back when I jumped in for my third straight presidential race reporting on Trump, in May 2023, at a new outlet which I have now outlived almost three times over here at 24sight (RIP The Messenger, more famous in death than in life) I kept thinking about my own exhaustion at covering the fleeting insanity of each new mini-scandal.
Some things truly mattered a great deal, in recording this first draft of history: the first attempt by a sitting U.S. president to deny the peaceful transfer of power (January 6th), the absconding with reams of classified documents and playing footsy with the FBI until they conducted a court-ordered search of a president’s country club (it’s shorter to type “raid”, but also wrong), the decision by the Supreme Court that a president could not be found criminally liable for “official” acts taken while in office, the near-assassination of the previous and current president, and more.
Other things generated fleeting laughs and temporary outrage without any follow-through from the subject of the story and the sense that the “kayfabe” of WWE politics had only us reporters suspended in disbelief while the populace fled to TikTok and YouTube where “newsfluencers” “told it like it is.”
News is about prioritizing for the public. It’s not “All the news”; it’s “All the news that’s fit to print” and a lot of the melodrama from our current crop of “outrage entrepreneurs” — retrofitted to a communications revolution which prioritizes racist shitposting over engagement — is not fit to print.
And worse than that, the ephemera only clouds the true scandals, the revolutionary abuses of power.
A couple years ago, I couldn’t shake the idea of the “nut graf” as the cure for all this. It’s the newspaper reporter’s equivalent of the catch-up montage at the start of each HBO serial. It is journalistic grounding and a distillation of why you should give a shit, especially in a world where everything seems to be fighting for your attention, from your watch to your fridge.
So each Monday, here on the show and in the newsletter of the show, I’m going to catch us up on stories of monstrous import to help us all stay grounded.
As I build this newest feature of Tom LoBianco Reports, I want to hear from you. “The Memory, Whole” is just the latest tagline I’ve come up with for this. I’m gonna keep this poll up for a week and then we’ll circle back before Monday’s show and settle on the name.
If you’ve got ideas, just comment on any of these wonderful publishing platforms where you find good 24sight News content or email me at tom@24sight.news.