Particularly upsetting to me over the years has been the almost vulgar enthusiasm with which the various media have reported on spectacular calamities. I wasn’t around for the Titanic disaster, obviously; but the story has been consistently fascinating and still gets attention on various anniversaries. It’s sold a lot of newspapers and theater tickets, and likely will continue to do so for a long time.

I was around for the horribly sudden and fatal big top fire at a July 6 performance, just eighty years ago in 1944, of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut. Allied troops had been ashore in western Europe only a month, and still were fighting fiercely to establish their lines; but the circus fire, with its graphic photos of the blazing tent (waterproofed – can you believe it? –with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline) and the lines of sheeted bodies laid out on the ground, captivated the media and their patrons as little else could have. Yet even then I can recall asking my grandparents when, after some weeks, the story would subside to at least below the fold of the front page.

Most of us, I daresay, remember the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 379 just over ten years ago. After behaving unpredictably, according to radar and satellite surveillance, it simply vanished. Wreckage washed up later in the western Indian Ocean. The search, eventually suspended officially without any resolution, was the most expensive in history. It also became the most exhaustively reported incident in living history (the Titanic survivors having succumbed to natural causes). Every evening when I heard Wolf Blitzer’s unmistakable voice cutting through the low sizzle of my frying, I shrank with dread at the certain prospect of yet another interview with yet another clueless government “investigator.” Wolf clung to that story as firmly as Pooh to his honey pot. But, as it’s said, it sold newspapers.

Which leads to my current beef with the national media. After weeks of flacking the earlier-than-usual “debate” (a debate, it wasn’t) between President Biden and former president Trump – “The stakes couldn’t be higher!” – we were all shocked (and some of us deeply dismayed) at the tentative, dismal performance of the president. He looked, to use an old Vermont expression, dazed as a stunned ox.

My friend Bea and I looked at each other. Uh-oh! But before we could process what we’d seen and discussed it - we are, after all, adults of some years and able to form judgments – here came the Keystone Kops of the media, filling the air and the commentary pages of the papers with opinions no more sophisticated than ours.

B the time you read this, the president may have been urged out of his candidacy by members of his own party staring at an electoral defeat less than five months away. That’s of minimal interest to me. He has to balance “When the going gets tough...” against “Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” It’s his decision, not ours.

What’s grinding, though, is the media’s apparent lack of interest in the performance of Donald Trump. Here’s most of Bea’s letter of protest to The Boston Globe: