Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

One of the main vehicles by which the press gets answers from the president is the “gaggle”—an ad hoc gathering of reporters and cameras, often occurring as he’s en route to or from the White House. It’s a perfect setting for Donald Trump, because he is skilled at parrying with the press, because the events generate viral clips, and, most important, because journalists often collapse into their roles as bit actors in the president’s drama.

For an example, let’s go back to Friday, August 1. At 8:30am—as happens on the first Friday of every month—the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the previous month’s employment numbers. They weren’t pretty: just 73,000 jobs created in July, along with an unusually sharp reduction of 258,000 jobs in May and June.

As politicians are wont to do, Trump sought to shift the blame. As authoritarians are wont to do, he attacked the civil servants who report the numbers. He quickly fired the bureau’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, claiming that she messed up the latest report and had also skewed the numbers last year to hurt his reelection chances: “On November 15, 2024, right after the Election,” he stated on Truth Social, “the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs—A TOTAL SCAM.”

Trump is wrong. The BLS did report a downward revision of 818,000 jobs, but that happened in August—during the Democratic National Convention and almost three months before the election. That seems like a nice boost for Trump’s campaign.

You might hope that, armed with such an obvious set of lies, our White House press corps would have been prepared, later Friday, when Trump appeared before the gaggle. But no. Asked about McEntarfer’s firing, the president said, “Right after the election, I think on the fifteenth, November 15, she had an eight- or nine-hundred-thousand-dollar [sic], massive reduction. Said she made a mistake.” Trump repeated his false claim and took at least a dozen more questions from the faceless, braying herd. But no reporter challenged him on that point, one that underlies his rationale for taking this unprecedented step. 

Maybe it’s asking too much to do a fact-check on the same day? Unfortunately, the same thing happened two days later. Trump appeared before a gaggle for twelve minutes on Sunday. He started by repeating his lie about McEntarfer: “If you remember, just before the election, this woman came out with these phenomenal numbers on Biden’s economy. Phenomenal numbers. And then, right after the election, they announced that those numbers were wrong.… So it’s a scam, in my opinion.”

A responsible reporter might’ve asked Trump, “Why do you say the 2024 job numbers were revised after the election, when this happened in August?” No one asked. Instead, Sunday’s gaggle elicited Trump’s pronouncements on the color of the stone in the paved-over Rose Garden and the political affiliation of Sydney Sweeney. 

(The gaggle also featured an innumerate garble-boast, when Trump claimed “we’ve cut drug prices by twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred percent. I don’t mean fifty percent, I mean fourteen-, fifteen hundred percent.” A responsible reporter might have been tempted to respond with something like, “Mr. President, how does that work? The next time I buy a bottle of aspirin for three dollars, Bayer will send me a check for forty-five dollars?” But no.)

Now, we know that Trump will not, when confronted with the truth, break down and confess his errors. He will double down and/or go off topic. He did both those things a few days later, when CNBC’s Joe Kernen tried to point out to Trump that he was wrong about the timing of the employment numbers. 

And we should note several stories that ran after the gaggles and pointed out Trump’s mendacity. Sometimes they were even topped with clear headlines like this one from The Guardian: “Trump defends firing labor statistics chief by lying about her role in 2024 campaign.”

But Trump’s gaggles are important, because they generate immediate, visually appealing clips that provide core content for network and cable shows, inserts in online stories, and fodder for skilled aggregators like Aaron Rupar and Acyn Torabi, whose snippets can get millions of views a day. We need reporters on the scene who are willing and able to challenge the president on the facts, who can make the truth part of the story as it happens. Instead, a press corps that is alternately uninformed, cynical, and supine is failing to ask Trump the most obvious questions. We would be better off letting the president speak into the microphone by himself, unimpeded by his unwitting collaborators.

It hardly does justice to call Hannah Cairo, age seventeen, a prodigy. As a girl growing up in the Bahamas, she was homeschooled and took many classes online. She developed an early aptitude for math; by the age of eleven, Cairo had mastered calculus. A few years later, she was taking graduate-level classes at the University of California, Berkeley. One of those courses—in Fourier restriction theory—provided her a special challenge, to prove or disprove “a forty-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.”

Cairo labored on the problem and determined it to be false, stunning mathematicians more than twice her age who had spent years trying to prove the opposite.

It’s heady, complex stuff, but Kevin Hartnett’s profile of Cairo in Quanta Magazine is sympathetic to the teen while showing the challenges she has faced not just in her academic career but in her personal life: “I didn’t have many social experiences, so I still had to learn how to interact with other humans,” Cairo told him.

Hartnett also manages to explain the math behind Cairo’s calculations in a way that a layman can (if they try hard enough) understand. And should you find his description too simple, the abstract for Cairo’s paper will provide the challenge you desire: “We derive a family of Lp estimates of the X-Ray transform of positive measures in ℝd, which we use to construct a logR-loss counterexample to the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture for every C2 hypersurface in ℝd that does not lie in a hyperplane. In particular, multilinear restriction estimates at the endpoint cannot be sharpened directly by the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.”

The homelessness problem in Los Angeles is immense. So many people have nowhere to live that you could fill Dodger Stadium and the city’s Crypto.com Arena with them all. Faced with such a massive societal issue, many journalists will either choose to cover it piecemeal or give up on tackling the underlying issues. 

But that’s not what Mitchell Landsberg and Gale Holland did. The Los Angeles Times duo delved deep into the history of the city’s efforts to combat homelessness, going back to the nineteenth century to detail how the government’s responses to mental illness, the housing shortage, and drug use have failed at almost every turn, particularly in the past few decades.

I was especially struck by their examination of how unaffordable the city has become: “The average cost of a home rose from $25,000 in the early 1970s to more than $1 million today. Even adjusting for inflation, a house in Los Angeles today costs roughly six times what it did then.… Today, the median rent in L.A. is $2,800; in 1970, it was about $900 in today’s dollars.” Add to that a Red Scare antipathy to public housing and discrimination against nonwhite tenants and buyers, and Los Angeles became increasingly unwelcome to the working class.

The writing is compelling, and Kelvin Kuo’s photo timeline brings home the long, intractable history of the city’s problem.

Loyal Laurels and Darts readers will recall our segment last month on Louis Amestoy, editor and publisher of the Kerr County Lead, whose tiny staff pushed out a dozen or so stories a day in the wake of the Texas floods that killed more than a hundred people, many of them young girls at a nearby summer camp. 

The Lead, a site Amestoy founded four years ago, has always been digital. But after the waters receded, he and his cohort published a forty-page print edition to collect the news, photos, and obituaries that they had prepared in the preceding days. In an editor’s letter, Amestoy noted the challenges his community faces, adding, “We will overcome it through sheer force of will. I believe that’s what has driven our coverage of this story, leading us to produce something beyond our relentless digital coverage—something tangible. I’ve never lost my love for print.”

In an email interview, Amestoy told me that “it was the importance of obituaries that really drove me to do this.” And the community backed him up. The print edition cost thirty-five hundred dollars to produce; a local real estate agent immediately fronted almost half the cost, and other businesses came through with additional funds. When the papers were off the presses, and Amestoy brought them to Pint & Plow. a local brewpub where he hosts a podcast, “we had a steady line out the door of people to pick up their copies.”

Does this mean a pivot to print for the Lead? Likely not. That edition was “our first, and probably last,” Amestoy said.

Hat tip to David Beard. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here.

To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.