Firehose #175: Dead Week

Also: Notes on when we make public statements about journalism-world controversies

Remember Dead Week, back in college? I don’t either, but: It was that interim, just before Finals Week, when there were no classes, truncated (or maybe even non-existent?) editions of the daily newspaper, and during which the “scheduling … of non-instructional events for which student participation is mandatory, is also strongly discouraged, and requires advance approval by the Office of Student Life.” In other words, an excellent time to party.

Such is the five-day stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, particularly when there’s a weekend within. The parents are sinking in front of the fire/Hallmark movie/WW2 doc, the kids are playing with their new toys in the snow, and the young adults are eyeing the exits and plotting trouble. This is the slowest editorial week of the season, when even your more reliable purveyors of content are — foreshadowing alert — gearing up to release pre-packaged year-end material, and otherwise engaging in dubious down-time holiday behavior, like watching Cameron Diaz attempting to act.

But you are reading this, aren’t you? Which is why I am writing this, on the deadest Sunday of 2025, rather than spend yet more time determining whether some recently deceased Ghanaian highlife musician has a song I fancy enough to add to the 11-hour, still-in-progress People Who Died playist….

* One week ago, ‘ere last we ‘Hosed, I was just putting the finishing touches on a carefully constructed, hopefully useful breakdown of the Ben Shapiro-Candace Owens-Tucker Carson-Megyn Kelly-Vivek Ramaswamy et al TPUSA contretemps as it then stood, when word began streaming in through the various channels that there was a new journalism-world controversy involving our friend Bari Weiss (veteran of Episodes #89, #115, #159, #180 & #187). All we knew then was that Weiss had at the last minute, over the strenuous objections of relevant staff, yanked a planned 60 Minutes segment on the horrid Trump-administration deportations to a prison in El Salvador, because she demanded further reporting. Did I want to bone up enough on the rapidly developing WTFery to then tuck a mention of it into an already 1,900-word weekend email? Reader, I did not.

This, combined with the lack of public commentary from any of the three of us within the first 16 or so hours of the 60 Minutes kerf(l)uffle, led one longtime listener to tweet at me, “I know she’s a friend of the show. Y’all been screaming about lefty cancel culture for 10 years. Your silence feels like hypocrisy.” Said listener was subsequently unmollified by my it’s-been-less-than-24-hours-and-also-sometimes-we-do-vacations-and-also-we’re-not-an-insta-comment-machine response, during which I also commented, using imprecise language, that “The spiking in question seems obviously mishandled.”

I bring this up not at all as a complaint, but as a Transparency Moment for those curious about how we work through such things, and also (as we shall see) an opportunity to link to a smart piece about the affair by another one of our friends. First, the aforeteased, prosaic (if ever-changing) reality of doing a twice-weekly podcast with a once-weekly email supplement. Sometimes the timing’s gonna be tricky, even during our non-holiday recording schedule!

To wit: In the (increasingly productive) Pivot to Video era, we have settled on Monday/Wednesday tapings (which, because of our increasingly professional editing, come to you promptly on Tuesday and Thursday mornings). There are also some supplemental episodes, a chunk of which you’ll begin enjoying in the New Year. In the initial push to generate subscriptions to our new YouTube channel, we also over-tilted toward having guests, many of whom were not best situated to do news-of-the-day material. This meant less Some Idiot Wrote This-style commentary from us, which y’all rightly complained about it, and which we’re course-correcting as early as this coming week.

But also, that Monday-Wednesday schedule, necessitated by gathering the whole juggernaut in the same room, is a bit on the, shall we say, inflexible side. There was so much news in our universe last week, including but not limited to the Bari stuff, that we did come pret-tay, pret-tay close to lashing together an unscheduled, ye olden days remote recording before heading into our respective holiday vortexes (vortices?). Alas, prior life/family/travel commitments proved too cumbersome.

We are figuring out these new rhythms as we go, and we value greatly your help in guiding us to the sweetest possible spot for mixing timeliness, untimeliness, guests, no guests, seriousness, alcoholism, serious alcoholism, and so forth. Long story short, I think it’s about time we bring back the One-Hitter….

Oh right, Bari. Turns out that the story got more complicated after those initial 16 hours, featuring some of the pathologies I had warned about on our show back when she was installed over at CBS News — namely, a semi-hostile newsroom ready to pounce on and leak any real and perceived missteps on her part, as well as her own managerial stretchedness and perennial attraction to political culture wars. On Friday, Mike Pesca (#343, #418 and #467) published what I think is a pretty thorough and fair assessment of both the dispute & the way other journalists are talking about it. His conclusion about the former:

Bari Weiss is an editor, not a censor. You don’t know her motives. You can guess they were in service of political or business goals, and I acknowledge the timing would be extremely frustrating to any journalist. But her requests also comport exactly with what an editor trying to move a newsroom toward what she defines as more honest, fairer footing would do.

Bad timing isn’t evidence of bad faith. And the substance of her concerns—get the principals on camera, explain the legal framework, sharpen the data presentation, advance beyond existing coverage—are legitimate editorial standards.

I appreciate Pesca here doing the thing that I wasn’t able or willing to do either last Sunday, or frankly this — to actually research and view and assess and opine and rebut and so forth. That kind of work requires a resource that many of us are not willing to part with during our own private Dead Weeks: Time. The more divisive an issue or person is, the more disputed the facts are, and the more legitimately complicated/multifaceted the underlying dispute is, the easier it becomes for people to spend time roughly the duration of a morning fart to pass curtly dismissive judgment, then begin mau-mauing people around them to follow suit. This can be both a handicap and eventual boon to those of us slow on the conclusionary draw; some of what would become my better-known pieces of writing started out as v-e-r-y long attempts to be able to have a factual answer to a controversy that most people had long thought was open-and-shut.

In the event, I’m going to be a bit harder on Bari than Pesca was, just by reiterating that working as a news-biz manager in a knives-out situation requires either some pretty brutal bloodletting of your own, or making damn sure that your shit smells the cleanest in the room. I would argue, both by personal temperament and the ugly reality that the president of the United States is applying direct and material pressure against this news program and its corporate owners, that the latter approach is most likely to succeed. Pulling a story that late was guaranteed to produce the backlash, both internal and external.

All that said, very few of Bari’s apparently bottomless supply of media tormentors could name her counterparts at NBC and ABC. She is fated to be a lightning rod, and just about everybody in the news criticism racket is going to be invited by extension to micro-manage her editorial decisions in ways that just won’t happen elsewhere.

We may yet talk about this stuff on the pod, but I wanted to be at least partly responsive in a corner that I control. Speaking of which, and especially for those newish to this Substack, my general purpose in these missives is to point and link to (rather than conclude about) the various relevant controversies in our world, amidst whatever other Fifth Columnist work, listener-generated content, and amusing nonsenses I can find.

* Because of the general contentlessness of Dead Week, I will take the non-routine step of embedding our whole Reason Roundtable from last Monday, on the subjects of J.D Vance, the MAGA civil war, the latest Epstein files release, various U.S. military strikes, welfare fraud in Minnesota, whether Christmas is socialist, and — yes! — the new Ken Burns series.

* Comment of the Week is not usually determined by popular vote, but my goodness, Jim here has 112 damned likes, which has to be a site record:

Anyone who is familiar with John Fugelsang…around the 17 minute mark is when your blood will start to boil.

For a man who claims to be stridently speaking out against fundamentalism….holy shit man take a look in the mirror. This guy is the high priest of American Left Wing Fundamentalism. He marinates his religious knowledge with left wing politics to the point where it becomes fundamentalism.

Appreciated this conversation on this platform and also Kmele for handling some of the condescending responses…..his complete bafflement that parents should have a say on “transgender kids” issues in California with THEIR OWN CHILDREN. And also him pretending not to understand the summer of 2020 religious analogies that Kmele was providing clear context for. There was extreme religiosity during that summer and he flippantly ignored that when he knows exactly what Kmele meant.

His declarative statements are infuriateing….Kmele you handled that much better than I would. Tank Yuh 🇯🇲.

Walkoff is prolly going on that list….