City adjusts to absence of presidential news cycle and reports mixed feelings about the experience
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] President Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet for seven consecutive days, a development that has produced in Manhattan an atmosphere that therapists, baristas, and taxi drivers across the borough independently describe as “strange,” “peaceful,” “deeply suspicious,” and “honestly I don’t know how to sit with it.” The White House has not explained the silence. The press pool has been briefed twice in seven days, both times on subjects other than the one everyone wants to ask about. The president has posted once on Truth Social, about golf. It was a Tuesday. Bohiney.com published what it could confirm. What it could not confirm was, in some ways, more interesting.
The psychological impact on New Yorkers, who have spent the past several years calibrating their morning anxiety to a specific type and volume of news, has been the subject of impromptu and entirely unofficial research by a clinical psychologist at Columbia who began asking her patients about the quiet on day three and has since produced seventeen pages of notes she is describing as “preliminary observations, not a study, please do not quote this as a study.” The observations suggest that approximately half of her patients find the quiet restful and half find it ominous, with significant overlap between the two categories.
The Media’s Response
Cable news has handled the silence in the way that cable news handles silence, which is to say: by filling it. Seven days of relative presidential quiet have produced approximately eleven hours of analysis per day across the major networks on subjects including what the quiet means, whether the quiet is strategic, what a strategic quiet would look like versus a non-strategic quiet, and whether the distinction between strategic and non-strategic quiet is itself meaningful or is being imposed by analysts who need the quiet to mean something because quiet, for cable news, is the one condition that cannot be broadcast.
What Day Eight Brought
Day eight produced a post. The post was about the World Cup. It mentioned FIFA’s decision to ban water bottles from stadiums, described the decision as “smart security,” and contained three exclamation marks. Cable news returned to regular operations within four minutes of publication. Manhattan exhaled. The exhale was, depending on your perspective, either relief or disappointment. Both feelings were widely reported and both were genuine.
Also see: Betoota Advocate.
Coverage Note
This story is published jointly at Bohiney.com and prat.uk, which together provide the kind of sustained, specific coverage of the communities and phenomena described here that neither could produce alone. The satire works because the situations are real. The situations are real because the communities are real. Both publications take seriously the idea that the funniest journalism is the journalism that is most accurately observed. The coverage continues.
The story above illustrates a pattern that both publications have documented across multiple regions and multiple years of coverage. The communities involved are consistent in their capacity to produce material of exactly this kind. The publications are consistent in their capacity to find it funny while taking it seriously, which is the only honest relationship a satirical publication can have with its subject matter.
The details will change. The structure will not. Both publications will be here when the next iteration arrives, which it reliably will. The coverage is the record. The record is the point.
Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk are committed to this kind of sustained, specific, honest satirical journalism. The commitment is ongoing. So is the material.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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