Breaking Down the News: September

Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford are sworn in to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27.

Picture courtesy of Getty Images.

Daily News Breakdown

It's probably too early right now to guess at what 2018 will be remembered for going forward. Politically there is so much happening all the time that it's tough to predict what will end up seeming as important in ten years as it was this year. Case in point: the Kavanaugh sexual assault hearings. In many ways, Brett Kavanaugh was a distillation of everything happening in America for the past several months. It was the Republican boy's club against the Democratic resistance. It was a hearing about sexual assault and how seriously those accusations will be taken when they're about a famous person. It was swing votes and delays and President Trump getting his way through sheer brute force. But all of that doesn't mean that the story will stay in the headlines down the line. The Clarence Thomas- Anita Hill hearings was a parallel issue that almost never got mentioned before the Kavanaugh news cycle began. Any Democratic push-back against the Trump administration would focus on the other officials around the president instead of attacking a sitting Supreme Court justice.

In an even more high-level aside, I want to talk about the way these hearings were covered. The two biggest sex scandal hearings of the 1990's are associated with the accusers. Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky have become synonymous with those incidents. There was also a lot more focus on the disturbing details around the fringes, the Coke cans and the cigars. The headlines around this case seem more responsible in their focus on Kavanaugh and his credibility instead of picking apart the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford. Even the Republicans who pushed hard for Kavanaugh tried not to attack her directly, aiming for plausible deniability and broad excuses instead of calling her a liar.

News Subjects

• I had to separate the Kavanaugh stories into two categories just to get some semblance of balance into this news cycle. Anything having to do with Christine Blasey Ford and the other women falls under the "Kavanaugh Abuse" tag, while the more traditional hearings and moments were under "Court Confirmation." And despite that, look at how thoroughly the allegations dominated this news cycle.

• Seriously, it says a lot about how much coverage Kavanaugh received this month that the hurricane is only the second-biggest story. Hurricanes and other American natural disasters usually dominate the news cycle when they happen. And Hurricane Florence, with its slow escalation in intensity and the massive flooding it left behind, seemed even more poised to rule coverage for a while.

• Buried under all the other coverage is the days of weird speculation about Rob Rosenstein possibly being fired and the Special Counsel possibly being in danger. That turned out to lead nowhere, as have most of the stories about potential derailments of Mueller. At this point, I think nothing will change around the investigation until well after the midterms.

• It's rare that a story about one of the three outlets I use for this exercise gets covered by the other outlets. There will be brief mentions that the AP broke a story first, but that's usually the extent of it. The anonymous op-ed in the New York Times really broke through that barrier and generated alerts from all three outlets about the potential identity of the writer. I don't know if this will ever get uncovered, or if it actually matters who wrote it, but it was interesting to watch.

• Speaking of rare occurrences, the US Open is the first sports event in a while to get enough headlines to make it into the top tier of headlines. This is mainly because the winners of the men's and women's tournaments received coverage from multiple outlets, with a little bit of extra Serena Williams headlines for good measure.