When the Scorekeeper Says Something You Don't Like

I have spent considerable time on my porch watching the world go by, and I have arrived at one observation that holds up across nearly every situation I have ever witnessed: a man will tolerate an enormous amount of inconvenience directed at himself, but the moment someone notices something unflattering about him out loud, he wants to know who's in charge and what can be done about it.

He will walk past a leaking roof for six months. He will drive a truck that sounds like two cats in a dryer and call it character. But let someone say something about his yard that isn't strictly complimentary, and he'll spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out who has the authority to make them stop.

Which brings me, in my own sweet time, to the president of the United States and a television host named Kristen Welker.

The president is upset because Welker said his endorsement record this election cycle has been, in her word, "mixed." He wants her reported to the Federal Communications Commission for what he called "rebuke or punishment." Now, I am no expert on broadcast regulation, but it seems to me the FCC was set up to manage broadcast licenses, not to referee disputes between presidents and television hosts who said a true thing that stung a little.

Here is what Welker said, as best I can reconstruct it. She was doing a live shot before the show, on the local Washington affiliate. She said Trump had "some mixed results" with his endorsements. She noted that his pick for Senate in one race won. She noted that other picks had not. Six Trump-backed candidates lost House and gubernatorial primaries in August. A USA Today analysis puts his gubernatorial endorsement success rate at 79 percent. That is not 100 percent. That is, by the plain definition of the word, mixed.

I think of this like a potluck where three people bring the same Jell-O salad and nobody brings the hotdish. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. You'd be a fool to call it a disaster, and you'd be a fool to call it perfect. You'd call it mixed and go get a plate.

The president says his endorsement record stands at 98.35 percent in Republican primaries. I will confess I do not know how you arrive at a number that precise about something as slippery as who won a primary and whether your endorsement was the reason. But I will leave that arithmetic to people with more patience for it than I have on a Thursday.

Here is the part I keep turning over. The FCC does not punish individuals. It regulates broadcast licenses. It looks at whether a station is serving the public interest, not whether a particular host said a particular true thing about a percentage. Asking the FCC to reprimand Kristen Welker for reading numbers aloud is like calling the county agricultural extension office because your wife said your corn looks short. They don't handle that. They can't handle that. And even if they wanted to, the nearest thing they could do is look at whether the station keeps its paperwork in order, which is not the same thing as making the lady on television apologize for doing arithmetic.

This is where the story widens. It's not just Welker. ABC and Disney are already in court with the FCC over the administration challenging their licenses because of coverage the president didn't care for. The FCC chairman, a fellow named Brendan Carr, was threatening to pull licenses from broadcasters over their reporting on the Iran war back in March, pointing to the president's complaints about fake news as his guiding star.

I want to tell you about Pastor Holmgren.

Our pastor has been at the Lutheran church in Chamberlain's Bend since the year the county stopped putting us on the map. He is a fine preacher. He is a terrible euchre player. When I say terrible, I mean he has lost so many hands at the church basement card night that the Lindqvist twins have been known to argue over who gets to sit across from him, and those two haven't agreed on the time of day since one of them married a Methodist.

Pastor Holmgren's solution, a few years back, was to propose that the church council adopt a rule against what he called "strategic gloating." He wanted it in the bylaws. He wanted the council to reprimand card players who celebrated too enthusiastically after winning a hand. The council looked at him. He looked back. Someone asked whether this applied to the potluck scoreboard too, since Dorothy Carlson had been insufferable about her rhubarb pie for three consecutive summers. The pastor withdrew the motion. He kept playing cards. He kept losing. He got better eventually, or at least quieter about it.

The point is you can't pass a rule against someone noticing you're losing. You can fire the scorekeeper, but the score is still the score. You can threaten the fellow with the clipboard, but the game still happened the way it happened.

What the president is doing here is not complicated. He's doing what Pastor Holmgren tried to do with the euchre bylaws, except with the weight of the federal government behind it and a television network in the crosshairs instead of a church basement full of Lutherans.

And the thing that makes it different, the thing that makes it heavier than a bad card night, is that a church council can say no to its pastor. The FCC can say no to its president too, I suppose, but it gets harder every time the person making the threats is also the person who picks the chairman.

I believe a town where you can't say what you see is a town in trouble. Doesn't matter whether what you see is flattering. What matters is whether the seeing is allowed. The day someone official can punish you for reading numbers out loud is the day the numbers start meaning whatever the person holding the punishment wants them to mean. And that's not a number anymore. That's just a story you'd better agree with.

The score is still the score. Always has been. That's the part you can't legislate away, no matter how many letters you send to the FCC.

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