Good morning. It is December 19th. It is an appropriate morning for the season here in New York City, cold and clear and drying out. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Teamsters who do Amazon deliveries are out on strike at seven facilities from Queens to Southern California, including Atlanta and Skokie, Illinois. Time to do the last minute shopping at a regular retail store, if you can find one that still bothers to stock merchandise. 

A French court has found Dominique Pelicot guilty, along with 50 other men, in his years-long scheme to drug his wife Gisele and invite strangers to rape her. Pelicot is sentenced to the maximum 20 years. Most of his 50 co-rapists received 8 to 10, rather than the 18 that prosecutors had been seeking.

A panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from continuing the prosecution of Donald Trump in his Georgia election interference case, finding that Willis's relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a significant appearance of impropriety to such a degree that, as CNN quotes the decision, “no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” CNN writes, “the court added, ‘We cannot conclude that the record also supports the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment.’”

404 media reports that amid the ongoing panic over supposed drone sightings over New Jersey, Tuesday night, the pilots of at least 11 commercial planes flying into New York City area airports reported having lasers from the ground shined at their aircraft, including in some cases their cockpits, according to an analysis of air traffic control audio obtained by 404 media. “In some of the audio, pilots can be heard saying ‘the lasers are definitely directed straight at us, that the lasers are tracking us.’ And at one point, air traffic control says, ‘yep, we've been getting them all night, like literally 30 of them.’” Nothing like being interested enough in what's in the air to decide to be a laser wielding vigilante, or also not being interested enough to know what ordinary commercial aircraft on heavily trafficked air routes look like.

And accused CEO killer Luigi Mangione has agreed to be extradited to New York after his arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania. CNN reports that he is now in NYPD custody and, on top of his Manhattan charges for murder and terrorism, CNN reports federal charges are expected to be unsealed. “They include,” CNN writes, “stalking murder and using a silencer in a crime of violence, multiple law enforcement officials tell CNN.”

Moving on to the news that's old enough to put on a printed newspaper. This morning's New York Times, doggedly clearing out its shelves of prestige journalism for end of year awards season, gives a double wide lead news spot over to secret payments allowed opioid pills to flow freely. “Drug manufacturers cut deals with benefit managers, Times inquiry finds.” It’s a worthy and valuable and appalling story. “For years,” the Times reports, “pharmacy benefit managers took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.” The story notes that “pharmacy benefit managers are hired by insurers and employers to control their drug costs by negotiating discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers. But a Times investigation this year found that they often pursue their own financial interests in ways that increase costs for patients, employers and government programs while driving independent pharmacies out of business.” This is all terrible and it will certainly be nice if the story helps lead to serious consequences for the people who abused their trust and harmed so many people. And it also has absolutely no business in the lead news slot when down at the left-hand side of the page, just a little bit above the fold is the headline “Trump attacks all but doom spending bill.”

On the website, at least, the Times is playing it as the lead news story. There the headline is, “Government shutdown nears as Trump demands Republicans reject spending deal.” Neither headline is really accurate, nor captures the full scope of the situation. Although the online subhead gets closer, “President-elect Trump weighed in against the spending package after Elon Musk warned Republicans not to support it, leaving the compromise on life support.” In the paper version, Donald Trump is still the protagonist of the story. “A bipartisan spending deal to avert a shutdown was on life support on Wednesday after President-elect Donald J. Trump condemned it, leaving lawmakers without a strategy to fund the government past a Saturday morning deadline. Mr. Trump,” the Times continues, “issued a scathing statement ordering Republicans not to support the sprawling bill, piling on to a barrage of criticism from Elon Musk, who spent Wednesday trashing the measure on social media and threatening any Republican who supported it with political ruin.” Yeah, that's your lead and your headline. The richest person in the world has hijacked the US government, going the Times wrote, “on a day long rampage against the bill, posting nearly nonstop on his social media platform X about how lawmakers needed to kill it.” That account doesn't mention that Musk was also completely wrong about the content of the bill, among other things, misstating the size of a congressional cost of living pay raise by a factor of 10. The Times writes, “Republicans gauging support for the legislation said they were bleeding votes as a result of Mr. Musk's barrage. ‘Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years,’ Mr. Musk wrote in one post.” It seems pretty clear that Elon Musk doesn't understand that senators serve six year terms, but why does he need to know things when people will just do what he says anyway? 

Next to that story on page one is a reminder that not only is Elon Musk usurping Donald Trump's prerogatives, but that technically those prerogatives don't even belong to Donald Trump at the moment. There is still a president of the United States, apparently. His name is Joe Biden. The headline is “Biden, wearied and stinging, prepares to exit, pushing himself with global travels and securing policy.” The story is a weird mixed bag of sympathy and hostility dwelling on his frailness and exhaustion, flagging him for shuffling or for avoiding steep stairs. It's the kind of story where in the final column, the Times writes, “his public messaging is targeted and restrained. Once Washington's most loquacious chatterbox, Mr. Biden these days barely engages with the reporters who follow him everywhere. He has held no news conferences and conducted no interviews with the traditional news media since the election, though he has done some podcasts. His only reply to shouted questions from journalists during his entire Africa trip added up to 14 words. In South America, it was just a single word.” Then they complained that he has “not once publicly addressed his much criticized decision to pardon his son since the written statement he released, nor has he discussed his consideration for blanket pardons for adversaries of Mr. Trump to protect them from his promised campaign of retribution once he takes office.” That is, reporters have not been able to hassle Biden into a back and forth in which they can badger him about a scandal or a potential scandal and get a quote that people can get mad about for a news cycle. But then just above that whole lamentation about the inaccessible and uncommunicative Biden, the story says “Mr. Biden gave a legacy speech last week at the Brookings Institution, outlining what he sees as the successes of his economic program and warning about the dangers of Mr. Trump's. “The roughly 40 minute speech in the works for weeks was meant to outline what Mr. Biden thinks worked in terms of the economy during his tenure and what will not work in the future. Although he coughed throughout and was hoarse by the end.” There is the relationship between our serious national legacy press and Joe Biden in a nutshell. He spoke for 40 minutes about the economy and the New York Times did not quote a single word of what he said, only that he coughed throughout and was hoarse by the end. Joe Biden had many weaknesses and failures as president. His decision to try to run for a second term when he was no longer capable of talking forcefully and clearly was a disaster. But a story like this is a reminder that the political press, led by the New York Times, did a worse job than he did and can't blame it on physical decrepitude, only on the moral, ethical and intellectual decrepitude of the institution. 

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. Our podcasting work is sustained by the subscription dollars and tip dollars of you, our faithful listeners. So please keep those coming. And if nothing unforeseen happens, we will talk again tomorrow.