Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks a bunch for starting your day with LMP, and an especially huge thank you to readers Michael Lewis, Rodney Sample, and my beloved 5th-grade teacher Nancy Diestler, who have all used the “buy me a coffee” link in the last two weeks to leave a tip. Your generosity and support are greatly appreciated, especially as this article has informed me that I will not be getting a job any time soon. The media landscape is hell right now, and I use every dime I make to keep LMP afloat.

All of that aside, there’s a Bo Burnham song that’s been running through my brain lately. Every time I open a news app to see what’s going on in the world, actually.

If you can’t (or prefer not to) watch the video, you can read the lyrics here.

This stanza, specifically, hits a sore spot left over from trauma on Twitter.

Oof. I felt that in my bones.

Anyway, each day, as I scroll through the news, I’m struck anew at how many important stories aren’t getting covered, and how many dumb stories are. That’s the problem slashing reporters and columnists across the news industry — there simply aren’t enough bodies left to cover everything. And yet, we keep getting stories that are entertaining, but not necessarily important, reported over and over by nightly news shows, cable news outlets, the mainstream media, and big accounts on social media.

The saga of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is a great example. Yes, it was funny to watch Donald Trump’s boondoggle face plant just in time for America’s 250th birthday (it’s still not fixed), but how many stories didn’t get reported out to the masses because everyone fixated on the peeling lining, the failure of the Great American State Fair, or all the artists who dropped out of performing on Trump’s big night? And hey, I’m as guilty as everyone else of getting caught up in the schadenfreude of the whole thing. Who can resist a chance to punch up at Trump over something that should have been so simple but went so spectacularly wrong?

But in the days when opening anything on your phone feels like “everything all of the time,” I worry that too much of the public is missing the big, important stories and getting caught up in the less important but easier-to-digest ones.

Another example: Trump’s gutting of laws that make it harder for criminals to launder money (at the behest of Elon Musk, no less) is getting almost no traction in the news, but represents a much bigger threat to our democracy than Martina McBride refusing to play America’s 250th birthday, or whatever is going on with Trump’s hair lately. The same goes for the recent Lancet article that crunched the numbers and found that the decimation of USAID (by Elon Musk and DOGE) will likely mean the death of 14 million people by 2030. Or that Thomson Reuters, a data broker that owns Reuters news agency, just gave ICE access to all of its investigative database. Trust me, we’re all in it.

These are big, important stories, illustrating how those in power can make the lives of tens of millions of people significantly worse, yet they aren’t getting out to the masses the same way Karoline Leavitt’s lip filler or Katie Miller’s latest unhinged podcast take are.

I was thinking about this today while I was bemoaning the fact that, in order to get an audience of any decent size these days, it’s practically mandatory to do video content, and a lot of it. Because let’s face it, a 15-second TikTok that glosses over an intriguing but ultimately insignificant story will always get more attention than an investigative long-form report. When did we stop reading?

I’ll be the first to say that we are being bombarded with news stories at a rate that is impossible to consume and remain mentally healthy — I complain about it here all the time. And I frequently have to step back and take breaks because of it. But I wonder what our country (and our world) would be like if we were able to pull back on the quick video hits on what some right-wing dipshit thinks about trans women in the WNBA (spoiler: there aren’t any), and focused more on making complex but important stories more digestible for the masses.

Another example: Trump donor Tim Barnard donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign in 2024. Since Trump took office in 2025, Barnard’s construction company has reaped $5.6 billion in border construction contracts. That’s a 5,600 percent kickback for Barnard, and should be a much bigger story. Instead, we’ve got a bunch of stories reporting that Karoline Leavitt’s farewell post was written by AI.

One of those things is inherently more newsworthy than the other, and one of those things is much easier for the average American to absorb. Let me be clear, I’m always up for laughing at the dumbasses in the Oval Office, but we have bigger fish to fry.

Check out the Google results for both of these stories.

vs.

Four results for the Barnard story, and only one written by a major outlet. Two of the stories are from June. Meanwhile, the Levitt story gets the full grid treatment, and has so many results they spill onto the following page. Because it used to be part of my job, I know most people don’t read past the top four Google results.

We’ve all got to do better. The media has to do a better job of deciding what’s newsworthy, and the public must do a better job of consuming news that takes a little effort and involves actual reading. It would have been difficult to reduce Watergate, with all its moving parts and players, into a TikTok video. Yet it was one of the most consequential stories of the 20th Century. I shudder to think what reporting on Watergate would look like today.

And hey, laughing at the MAGA crowd is a great way to relieve stress, which we all have in spades right now. I don’t begrudge anyone laughing at Kash Patel’s googly eyes or Pete Hegseth’s exponential stupidity. But I do take issue with those being the only stories that seem to be penetrating the public’s minds, when there is much more that voters need to be aware of. If all casual news readers get is the fluff, it’s hard to blame them for thinking that both sides of the political aisle are the same, or that politics is just two groups sniping at each other.

Just yesterday, I was lamenting to a friend how much I miss sitting in bed with the New York Times and a cup of coffee on Sunday mornings. Somehow, holding a phone and scrolling down a screen just isn’t as satisfying or as cozy. But I’m beginning to wonder if, with all the bite-sized content we consume, we’ve lost something bigger. Namely, the ability to read deep dives and navigate more challenging subject matter.

I’m afraid the future of our democracy may rest on our ability to do just that.

In other news: A federal judge dismisses Trump’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard; Trump wants to spend nearly $1 billion tearing apart the White House; A third person has died at ICE’s Delaney Detention Center; and The High Note.

Here we go.

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A federal judge has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard, which claimed that the school had not done enough to combat antisemitism. Keep in mind, this is coming from the administration that literally employs Nazis and hailed the Charlottesville mob as “very fine people.”

This is one of those situations where one has to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time. It’s true that antisemitism is on the rise around the world, and it’s also true that the right is using “antisemitism” as a cudgel to browbeat colleges and universities into rolling back DEI and free speech policies, while also doing business with known antisemite Elon Musk.

It’s become increasingly clear that while Americans struggle to pay for food, gas, and health insurance, the only thing Donald Trump is actually interested in is what awards he can win and what else he can put tacky gold leaf on. Accordingly, Trump wants to spend nearly $1 billion on “renovations” to the White House.

Why can’t we give kids free school lunches again? And whatever happened to “the ballroom will be entirely funded by private donations?”

Turns out, Trump plans on getting half of that funding by robbing the National Parks.

As my Minnesotan mother-in-law would say, “Oh fer awful.”

I know people bristle when I call these detention centers “concentration camps,” but what other term is there for a place where due process has no meaning, people are held like cattle in cells when they have committed no crime, their health and wellness needs regularly go unmet, and the guards have no accountability? That’s a concentration camp.

ICE also tried to keep Chajón’s death under wraps, claiming that because he died in the hospital, ICE had nothing to do with his death.

There’s an important thread on all the ways ICE is brutalizing detainees here.

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

Here’s a pretty little ditty to take you into the weekend.

Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Have a great weekend!

Follow Julie on Bluesky and Instagram so she can get another book contract.