Good morning. It's June 27th. The dry air that's supposed to be coming to New York City has not arrived yet. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. A Bolivian general tried to overthrow the government yesterday, sending an armored vehicle to batter the doors of the presidential palace before crowds rallied in support of President Luis Arce and the troops dispersed. The general accused of the plot was arrested. This attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government is not on the front of the New York Times. Save for a tiny referral headline at the very bottom of the page, which reads, Unrest rattles Bolivia. Members of the military quickly retreated from the presidential palace in an apparent failed coup try. And then you have to go to page A10 to see a single column of news. No photograph, three bylines.

Not a great performance, but at least the Times didn't preemptively declare the coup a success, which is a giant step forward from where the Latin American desk was around the turn of this century. But how can you put a coup attempt on page one when you gotta make room for elite private schools divided by the war in Gaza? A piece exactly like every other culture clash story the Times has written about disagreements over the war, only even narrower and pettier. 

The lead news story is Justices permit Biden's lobbying of social media about the Supreme Court's 6 -3 decision that the parties who had brought a lawsuit complaining that the government was performing unlawful censorship by asking social media companies to take down posts with misinformation about the pandemic and the 2020 election had suffered no injury and had no standing to bring the suit. Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch wrote some brain -poisoned nonsense in dissent, but the decision was really a non -decision. Unlike the one the Times put on page A18, where a 6 -3 conservative majority tortured language, common sense, and the plain facts of the case, to rule that a mayor who asked for and got a $13 ,000 kickback from a garbage truck company for steering the city's garbage truck buying business to the company had taken not a bribe, but a gratuity. One of those ambiguous gifts like a Christmas tip to your garbage collector or an all expenses paid luxury vacation or a free quarter million dollar motor home that cannot be proven to have corruptly influenced a public official one way or another. Back on page one, the second news column is a wide angle look by Peter Baker at Joe Biden's performance as president, performance here in the theatrical sense, as Baker writes about how Biden's desire to make deals and be seen as a bipartisan dealmaker has ill -served his image in today's antagonistic political climate. Baker writes of Biden's interest in making deals, in some ways it has been a formula for success that upended expectations resulting in a raft of landmark liberal programs that will mark Mr. Biden in the history books as one of the most prolific legislative masters since Lyndon B. Johnson. And yet, Baker continues, it has not been a formula for executing the most essential mission that he assigned himself when he took office, healing a broken country ridden by profound economic, ideological, cultural, political, and geographic divisions. Baker then writes that his approach has not won over the public. Mr. Biden can travel the country cutting ribbons from the most ambitious infrastructure package since the 1950s. He can trumpet the biggest investment in fighting climate change in history, and he can boast of job creation, unemployment, and stock market figures that Ronald Reagan would have coveted in 1984's Mourning in America. But polls show a majority of voters are not impressed or not paying attention. A remarkable account of the current state of public perception of presidential politics from a person whose entire job is to use the most prominent space in one of the most prominent news outlets to give the American public an accurate, ongoing picture of what the president is doing and how effectively he's doing it. The story does note that after Biden took office at a moment of extreme turmoil, his predecessor having attempted to violently prevent the election results from being certified, Mr. Biden expected the fever to break as his twice -impeached and seemingly discredited predecessor faded away. The trick was that Mr. Trump refused to go away and has spent nearly four years stirring the pot, fueling resentment and trying to tear down the system that Mr. Biden represents. It then goes on to mention that Biden is saddled with the lingering effects of inflation and images of migrants streaming over the border. Saddled by whom? By the newspaper, that dedicated blanket full -page spreads to the the migrant crisis, maybe? Anyway, Donald Trump just won't fade away. The Biden story jumps inside the paper to a page and a half spread, in which the leftover half page is devoted to the story, Republicans have rallied behind Trump since conviction, times CNN poll finds. After four paragraphs about how Trump is stronger with Republicans than ever, the story gets around to noting, at the same time, the poll revealed some vulnerabilities for Mr. Trump because of his conviction especially among independent voters who could prove decisive in November. Twice as many independents said the conviction made them more likely to oppose Mr. Trump than support him, and a majority of independents also believe he received a fair trial. Anyway, tonight's the debate. Time for a whole new round of impression management. That is the news. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.