Good morning. It is December 31st. This is it. The last dregs of 2024. It is a sunny morning on the way to a cloudy afternoon on the way to a rainy night for the people out celebrating one of the biggest amateur drinking nights of the year, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The front of this morning's New York Times is wrapped inside an eight-page supplement with a giant black and white, mostly black, photo of Jimmy Carter on the front. The six full pages of inside text and pictures Are devoted to the obituary that ran in a shorter form in yesterday's newspaper How exactly the obituary attains such length is a bit of a mystery. The four and a half decades of his post-presidency, rate about a half page in the whole thing. The eradication of guinea worm gets a single sentence, Habitat for humanity gets two. His presidency, meanwhile, unfolds with no mention of the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero, or any mention of El Salvador at all. Indonesia, where the Carter administration supported mass slaughter In the name of American interests is also completely absent. Iran is merely the place where Carter was undone by the hostage crisis, which emerged from a revolution, which emerged from some completely unspecified set of previous events and circumstances, probably having nothing to do with the United States. 

On the actual front of the newspaper, underneath the wrapping, Carter's post-presidency does get its due. “After a presidency ended, Carter took on the world,” as the two-column headline. “A mission of service that helped to defeat illnesses and further human rights.” This is where the Guinea worm coverage goes. 

“One of Mr. Carter's biggest and most lasting post-presidential accomplishments, the Times writes, is also one of the most overlooked.” By whom? “The near total eradication of Guinea worm disease, a painful parasitic infection for which there is no treatment or vaccine. In 1986, it afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people, mostly in Africa and Asia. There were only seven reported cases through the first 10 months of 2024, according to the Carter Center, Mr. Carter's human rights organization.”

Below that, in an even more striking testimonial to the virtues of the ex-president, the headline is, “In Commanders in Chief Club, A Frequent Critic Was a Misfit.” Peter Baker writes, “when President Biden stopped by former President Jimmy Carter's home in Plains, Georgia in April 2021, it was more than just a show of respect from one commander-in-chief to another. It was the first time in the 40 years since Mr. Carter left the White House that any of his seven successors had visited him in his hometown.” 

The story goes on to say “he did not join his fellow presidents on the high dollar speaking circuit, nor did he team up for many joint humanitarian missions. He was rarely consulted by incumbents, except when he forced his way into some issue and made himself hard to ignore. When all of the living presidents gathered to welcome Barack Obama to the White House in 2009, Mr. Carter was the one standing slightly off to the side, removed from his chummy peers physically and metaphorically. To many of his successors,” Baker writes, “he was a thorn in their side, always doing his own thing, even if it conflicted with official foreign policy. What he considered principled, they considered sanctimonious. While other former presidents generally held their tongues out of deference to the current occupant of the Oval Office, Mr. Carter rarely stood on ceremony. ‘I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,’ he said in 2010.” Not wrong, and, on balance, a good enough last word to leave him with. 

On the left-hand side of the front page, the Times reveals yesterday's national mood focused coverage of the South Korean airliner crash for the vamping that it was, following up with a straightforward news story. “From emergency to deadly crash in four minutes, Korean jet disaster, early questions emerge about accident that killed 179 people.” The questions seem to revolve around why the pilot, after reporting a bird strike on first approach to landing, hastily turned around and tried to land on the runway in reverse, rather than circling around to do a full second attempt, and why there was a concrete barrier waiting for the airplane when it overshot the runway. The latter point gets its own separate story inside the paper. The Times writes, “most airports don't have similar structures in such proximity to runways. Experts said. When they do, they're typically made of softer materials designed to break apart or absorb impact with minimal damage to a plane that overruns a runway. In this case, the concrete structure was housing,” the Times writes, “for a localizer, an antenna array that is used to guide aircraft during their approach and landing, local officials said.”

Down below the fold, the Times continues its investigation into the Shen Yun dance troupe and its connections to the sprawling and sketchy empire of interlocked operations run by Falun Gong, specifically here, the bizarre Epoch Times newspaper. “Shenyang needed good press. One paper always provided it.” The sub headline is “Epoch Times churned out 17,000 articles on dance troupe. Responding to a request for comment,” the Times writes, “a representative for the news outlet, Samuel Cho, said in a statement that the New York Times was intending to report multiple false claims without detailing what they were. ‘The Epoch Times as an organization is committed to supporting truth and tradition, the statement said. In that vein, the Epoch Times has proudly and transparently supported traditional culture by sponsoring Shen Yun.’ Mr. Cho added that the publication is editorially independent. Later on,” the story notes, “a job opening for an editor circulated among practitioners in Britain last year said that the requirement for candidates to have journalism experience could be waived for Falun Gong practitioners. Two former employees said a supervisor told them practitioners did not need to come in with journalism experience because Falun Gong's meditations gave them the wisdom to perform their jobs at a higher level than non practitioners whom adherents call ordinary people.” 

Wow. Yeah, that definitely sounds absolutely unlike anything to be found in the hiring processes of legacy media institutions. Doesn't it? 

And on page A-19, the Times reports, “President-elect endorses Johnson to serve again as Speaker of the House.” After having jerked Mike Johnson around on the effort to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. Donald Trump is back for the moment, to trying to prop him up. Against the threat of another crackpot rebellion in his tiny depleted and unstable majority. 

That is the news. Tomorrow is a whole new year. 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 through the subscription dollars and tip dollars of you, the listeners. Please do keep those coming.

Stay safe and dry out there. We are taking a holiday tomorrow, but if nothing too unforeseen happens, we will talk again on January 2nd, 2025.