Tweet of the day
“Jeopardy!” player James Holzhauer, the third all-time highest earner in that show’s history and the winner of the recent and first-ever “Jeopardy!” masters tournament, put out a winning tweet after the Seacrest announcement:
“Wheel of Fortune went about this all wrong. First you subject the contestants and viewers to an endless parade of temps who don’t prepare before hosting. Then the producer in charge of the search says ‘Actually, *I* would be the perfect host.’ Then ‘jk we have two hosts now.’”
A controversial town hall
OK, back to the serious stuff. Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have a town hall this evening that will be televised by NewsNation and hosted by its anchor Elizabeth Vargas. It will be held in Chicago in front of an audience of Democrats or independents who are leaning Democrat.
Vargas told The Hill’s Judy Kurtz, “This is everybody’s chance to really sort of get — unedited and live — hear him speak and listen to how he thinks.”
Is that a good thing? Kennedy’s ant-vaccination views are seen as dangerous by many. CNN’s Jake Tapper said on a recent podcast that he would not host a town hall with Kennedy because he “spreads dangerous misinformation about childhood vaccines.”
About Kennedy’s stance on vaccines, Vargas told Kurtz that they were “definitely very, very controversial.”
She added, “He has been heavily censured by many social media platforms in the past about his stances on them. And if somebody asks him a question about vaccines — I’m sure it will come up —I will remind our audience that the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and the (Food and Drug Administration), and the (American Medical Association), and the American Academy of Pediatrics and most of the medical and scientific community say that vaccines overall are incredibly safe and have saved hundreds of millions of lives over the past decade.”
However, Vargas added, “This town hall is not a town hall about vaccines.”
Well, here’s hoping it’s partly about vaccines. Vargas not only has a responsibility to ask Kennedy about his stance on vaccines, but to fact-check him in real-time to make sure he doesn’t spread dangerous misinformation.
Vargas said, “It is my job to moderate the questions from the audience. I think that we do our greatest public service when the audience gets to see him speak, and think, and react in real-time and fully. You can say, ‘Hey, I agree with that position,’ or, ‘Hey, I think he’s wacky.’ That’s up to our audience to decide. I want to provide them with the capacity to watch him answer questions on Russia, on the economy, on the border, on the fentanyl crisis in this country, on crime, on the economy, and to have him explain his positions, explain how we arrived at those positions and how he defends those positions.”
Here’s hoping Vargas isn’t afraid to step in if Kennedy says anything that’s flat-out wrong or dangerous and doesn’t leave it “up to our audience to decide.”
More no comments
Earlier this week, I wrote about how The Denver Post is dropping the comments sections on its online stories. Now another Alden-owned newspaper is doing the same. The Boston Herald announced Tuesday that it, too, is ending readers’ comments on stories published online.
In a note to readers, publisher Kevin Corrado and executive editor Joe Dwinell wrote that dropping the comments will “dramatically speed up the performance of the website.” They added, “This change will make for a faster online reading experience on mobile and desktop platforms.”
That’s a little different of an explanation than the one given by Denver Post editor Lee Ann Colacioppo, who wrote the Post’s comment section had become “an uncivil place that drives readers away and opens those trying to engage in thoughtful conversation to hateful, personal attacks. None of it managed to make our commenting section the productive space for engagement we envisioned.”
Like The Denver Post, the Boston Herald will still offer readers the opportunity to comment by contacting staff directly through email and via letters to the editor, as well as commenting on the news outlet’s social media sites.
Tuning in
