The Trump Who Cried Wolf?—third debate, second highest ratings—newspapers’ cruel summer fades to gloomy fall

The Trump Who Cried Wolf?—third debate, second highest ratings—newspapers’ cruel summer fades to gloomy fall  by By Joe Pompeo | (n Republished with permission of the author and Politico in which the articles appeared)

TRUMP TALK WITH THE RIVERSIDE DRIVE SET -- Take it away, Sir Harry Evans: "Where were all the investigative reporters? The press in the United States was very slow to get onto Trump. ... The Times finally got going and did some great stuff [but] by and large, I'm disappointed, because I thought the investigative journalism would have started much earlier." The British journalism titan (and husband of Tina Brown) was in the Upper West Side living room of Steve Coll and Eliza Griswold last night, gabbing about 2016's once-in-a-lifetime campaign coverage with a few dozen establishment media types convened by Kyle Pope, the new editor in chief of Columbia Journalism Review, which hosted the gathering.

Veteran political strategist Howard Wolfson tossed out an alternate observation. The fact-checking of political advertisements now has a sort of "nostalgic quaintness" to it, he said. "I don't know when people in your business decided this wasn't a useful function," Wolfson continued, but back in the day, "it kept us to a certain degree of honesty that, if you're coming up in the political business now, you don't have to think about."

Maybe journalists haven't had time to fact-check ads because they've been so busy fact-checking everything that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth? New York Times political editor Carolyn Ryan pointed out that no fewer than 19 of her reporters were on fact-checking duty during Wednesday night's debate. Web traffic numbers show that fact-checking pieces have become more popular than the traditional debate stories, she said. As to Evans' criticism about the press corps being asleep at the wheel during the early days of Trump's astonishing rise, Ryan countered that there was some Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf at play. "I think a lot of us were initially quite skeptical of how far this would go," she said.

Also in the room (in no particular order and with apologies to anyone we've left out): Victor Navasky, Alice Rogoff, James Bennet, Joanne Lipman, Steve Adler, Kate Kelly, Jesse Eisinger, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Jim Schachter, Rebecca Blumenstein and Will Oremus. There was wine and lasagna and biscotti for all, and a transcript of the evening's (explicitly) on-the-record dinner conversation will be posted on CJR's website.

THIRD DEBATE DREW 71.6M VIEWERS -- In other words, according to the Nielsen figures, more than the second (66.5 million), fewer than the record-breaking first (84 million), but still the third most-watched debate in history (behind Carter-Reagan's 80.6m on October 28, 1980). The broadcast breakdown went like this: ABC - 10.96m; NBC - 10.39m; CBS - 10.12m. The big three of cable news: FNC - 11.35m; CNN - 8.71m; MSNBC - 5.52m. On social media, according to Nielsen, "[activity] peaked ... when 4.6 million interactions occurred as the candidates discussed their fitness to be president, if they would accept the outcome of the election, and foreign hotspots." CNN called the debate infavour of Clinton 52 to 39% within 15 minutes of it ending.

FACEBOOK LOGS 3.3 *BILLION* VIEWS FOR DEBATE-RELATED VIDEO: Hadas Gold got some fun data from the social media site: "Donald Trump had one of the most watched debate-related videos with more than 29 million views, posted during the second of the three presidential debates. It's of the moment Trump responded to Hillary Clinton's quip that 'it's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country' by saying 'because you'd be in jail.' One of Clinton's most watched videos in that time period was about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, posted after the first debate. That got more than 19 million views." But the biggest draw of all was a video of people punching their screens as Trump spoke during the first debate. http://politi.co/2es1qR5

Third Presidential Debate Highlights | Trump, Clinton on Abortion, Trump Said Women Get Abortions Days Before Birth. Doctors Say They Don’t.

Trump Said Women Get Abortions Days Before Birth. Doctors Say They Don’t.

Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton offered drastically different opinions on the issue of abortion during the presidential debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

In the presidential debate Wednesday night, Donald J. Trump expounded on pregnancy and abortion, asserting that under current abortion law, “You can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day.”

Doctors say the scenario Mr. Trump described does not occur.

“That is not happening in the United States,” said Dr. Aaron B. Caughey, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health and Science University.

“It is, of course, such an absurd thing to say,” he said. “I’m unaware of anyone that’s terminating a pregnancy a few days prior to delivery of a normal pregnancy.”

There can be situations where complications or problems occur late in pregnancy — if the woman was in a car crash, for example, or if she was suffering from severe pre-eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition involvinghigh blood pressure.

But in cases like that, doctors said, the baby would be delivered before the due date, either by inducing labor or performing an emergency cesarean section.

If, very late in pregnancy, a fetus was found to be nonviable — to have a condition that would not allow it to survive after birth — the woman might continue the pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby, or she might decide not to continue the pregnancy, Dr. Caughey said.

“Would you call that an abortion?” he said. “I think most of us wouldn’t use that language. We would say induction of labor for a nonviable pregnancy.”

Mr. Trump made his statements to condemn Hillary Clinton, who, as a senator, voted against a federal ban on late-term, or what critics call partial-birth, abortions.

Abortions that occur more than halfway through pregnancy are very rare in the United States, and many states have laws that add restrictions to the timing of abortions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights, 1.3 percent of abortions in the United States occur at 21 weeks of pregnancy or later.

Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, essentially established abortion as legal up until a fetus would be viable outside the womb (about 24 weeks into pregnancy) but also said later abortion is permissible under certain conditions, including to protect the life or health of the mother.

The Guttmacher Institute reports that 43 states prohibit abortion after a specific time in pregnancy, including 19 states that set the limit at fetal viability, three that prohibit abortion in the third trimester, beginning at 27 weeks, and 15 states that ban abortion at 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Some of these laws are considered unconstitutional by abortion rights advocates, but their existence indicates that late-term abortion is extremely rare.

On social media, many people reacted sarcastically or angrily to Mr. Trump’s assertions.

A few wrote emotionally about their own late-term abortions, and said that Mr. Trump minimized the pain they felt in having to make one of the most difficult decisions in their lives.