Good morning. It is September 18th. It's a cloudy morning in New York City, cooler than it was before, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The lead story on the front of this morning's New York Times is the pager attack against Hezbollah yesterday. The paper has nine dead and at least 27 others injured. Apparently, the Times reports, by an ounce or two of explosives having been inserted into a shipment of gold Apollo brand pagers made in Taiwan. Israel still has not commented on the bombings, although no one is presuming anything but that it was an Israeli operation. The pagers exploded, the Times writes, “a day after a senior Biden administration official, Amos Hochstein, met in Tel Aviv with Israel's defense minister, Yoav Gallant, in an effort to prevent Israel's conflict with Hezbollah from escalating into an all -out war.” 

And, on the subject of all -out war as a strategic tool, above that, on the jump page, “after surviving Israel's onslaught, Hamas plans its future in Gaza.” A look at how Israel's campaign of pulverizing Gaza and displacing its entire civilian population has not led to victory over Hamas and doesn't seem likely to. Maybe war with Hezbollah in Lebanon will work out differently somehow. 

Three pages further into the paper in the international section, Yoav Gallant resurfaces in the story “Netanyahu May Replace Israel's Defense Minister,” a story that bizarrely contained no reference whatsoever to the Pager attack, saying instead, “the talks to replace Israel's top defense official at a time of war rattled the country as increased chatter about an escalation with Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese armed group, led many to fear a wider conflict following months of war in Gaza.” There are different deadlines for different parts of the paper, but given that the Pager attack happened yesterday morning US time, it’s legitimately insulting to those of us who buy the morning paper that no one bothered to write it into the story. It's hard to believe a major attack against Hezbollah, wounding thousands of people around Lebanon and in countries beyond, wouldn't have some sort of effect on the current position and status of the Israeli defense minister. But the Times just slapped it in the paper, stale as it was. 

Elsewhere on page one, there's a four-column photo of floodwaters in the Czech Republic, Instagram announced that it's going to make minors accounts private by default and cut off notifications for them between 10p and 7am. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, talked to the Times about the changes. The Times writes, “‘we decided to focus on what parents think because they know better what's appropriate for their children than any tech company, a private company, any senator or policymaker or staffer or regulator,’ he said in an interview. Instagram's new effort called Teen Accounts was designed to essentially ‘default minors into age -appropriate experiences on the app,’” he said. Mosseri delivered this little speech about how Instagram is listening to parents' concerns and how regulators should have no role, two weeks before the sixth anniversary of his appointment as the person in charge of Instagram. It is important to listen to the parents after you have exhausted absolutely every other option.

Next to that, “Trump is advised on golf security. More protection needed, Secret Service says.” That story, and a fuller story about the Secret Service response inside the paper, both note that Trump's to play golf on Sunday, during which the Secret Service shot at and chased off a person lurking in the bushes, apparently waiting to ambush Trump with an assault rifle, was not on the candidate's official schedule, an excuse that loses most of its persuasive power in light of the fact that the apparent would-be shooter, who seems to have an overall tenuous grasp on reality, was able to make the highly sophisticated guess that Donald Trump might choose to play a round of golf on a Sunday afternoon. The Times reports, “‘he's a creature of habit and I think you sort of lose the element of surprise when he's using one of his golf courses that are in close proximity,’ said Jonathan Wackrow, a longtime Secret Service agent who is now in private security.” 

On page A18, a strikingly ambiguous headline reads, “Pelosi blamed New York for House losses. Hochul wants to try again.” The story of how after the incompetence of the New York State Democratic Party cost the Democrats their House majority in the midterms, Governor Kathy Hochul says this time around she'll do better. But the story presents, without resolving them, two competing accounts of what it was that went wrong last time out. One is that the New York State Democratic Party has historically been a hacky and ineffectual appendage of the governor. The Times writes that “Hochul is trying to transform the state's Democratic Party from a perennial punching bag into a sophisticated turnout operation with 37 field offices and nearly 100 staff members.” But the other problem is that New York's suburbs are full of people who may be nominally Democrats, but because there's no real danger that Republican kooks will take over the state and destroy it, feel free to indulge their racism and manufactured moral panics in the voting booth. Hochul has tried to meet these people's desire to be pandered to by killing New York City's congestion pricing plan and devastating the transit budget, but their TVs keep telling them that they should be mad about crime and about immigration. And though crime and immigration have both come down, the plan seems to be to harp on those Republican-friendly grievances to show that New York Democrats haven't lost touch with the voters. 

Below that, speaking of crime, the NYPD's subway shooting spree makes it into the paper, with the trademark distancing New York Times headline, “critics question NYPD after subway shooting that injured bystanders.” The lead starts stronger but then loses its way. “A 49 -year-old man was in critical condition late Monday.” Gonna pause again here to note that nothing was stopping this Wednesday newspaper from providing an update that was less than 36 hours old about the person's condition. But anyway, “a 49 -year -old man was in critical condition late Monday after being shot in the head by police”—correct ”—during a confrontation at a Brooklyn subway station between officers and a knife -wielding man who they believed had not paid his fare, officials said.” The officials may have said that, but whether the person was wielding the knife is unclear enough that the Daily News quietly deleted that language from its headline about it. A little lower down we get, “let's not forget why this started, Janno Lieber, the MTS chief executive, told reporters on Sunday. It started because somebody wanted to come to the transit system with a weapon.” Like, no, it absolutely didn't start because of that. Not even in the cops' account did this start over anything but a $2 .90 subway fare going unpaid. The knife came into the story well after the police had started the confrontation, and, awkwardly for the police, vanished after the shooting. The Times tried to get people on the street to give both sides on the question, of whether the cops should have blasted a 49-year-old bystander in the head while shooting up a crowded scene because someone jumped a turnstile, but, after two people told them that the cop's behavior was senseless and recklessly disproportionate, the best they could do by way of counterpoint was “others were less quick to judge the police harshly. Alyssa Rios, a student, said she wanted more details to be released. ‘If they felt threatened, then they should defend themselves, but they should train police on how to disarm without using guns,’ she said.” Turns out there's no constituency for cops emptying their guns into a crowd. Except maybe in those all-important suburban congressional swing districts. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going, and if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.