PARIS – Like so many others, I followed a pulse-pounding TV drama: backbiting jackals fought for control of a bedrock American news network they intended to pervert for political clout and power trips. Meantime, I also watched the finale of “Succession.”

After that town-hall “interview” last month, Robert Reich posed the key question: “Why in hell did CNN give Donald Trump a full hour of prime-time television before an audience of ardent supporters who applauded every lie and laughed at every sexist insult?”

Because “optics” muscles aside substance. News costs a lot to gather so replacing it with smoke and circus boosts profit. CNN is only one flagrant example of why Americans are largely blind to an overheated world in which despots and oligarchs are fast quashing their cherished values.

Ted Turner’s CNN began with a barebones Atlanta studio in 1980, at first so quirky it was dubbed Chicken Noodle News. But its correspondents ranged the world for courageous, rock-solid reporting. Today, smeared with corporate sleaze, it is chicken something-else.

As I was finishing this report, a news flash forced a redo: David Zaslav, the “content” mogul who swallowed CNN a year ago, fired Chris Licht, the new CEO he had tasked with reshaping it. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Mine is that it will be ugly.

CNN still provides some compelling coverage. But any news organization’s authority depends on credibility and day-to-day standards. Its worst blunts its best. Even at Fox “News,” a travesty to truth, a few good reporters play piano in a whorehouse.

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PARIS — This one is personal. After posting a shorter version on Facebook, I emailed a copy to a Zuckerberg-averse friend, now 87, a New Yorker who retired to the Carolinas after publishing some great books — and also one of mine. He suggested I make it a Mort Report.

In the photo, my ambience-director wife, Jeannette Hermann (on the left), is with Jillie Faraday, a multi-talented grande dame and for decades our neighbor afloat on the Seine. They’re advancing a family bash next month near Amalfi. I’ll be 80, inshallah. Hence, this piece.

Being a zealot about firsthand reporting, I’m bemused when people in their 20s, or 60s, describe authoritatively what it’s like to be in the octogenarian zone. Mostly malarky.

We all have a sell-by date, but we’re all different. Physical aspects are secondary. As with cars, parts can be swapped out. FDR did admirably in a wheel chair to end the Great Depression and (eventually) take the lead to beat back Hitler and Hirohito. It's those little gray cells that matter.

PARIS — In his parting dump of Fox droppings, Tucker Carlson “interviewed” the porcine ex-president who he had told colleagues he hated passionately. For half an hour, he beamed approval at reversed-reality insanities, all delivered with the usual snifter of self-pitying whine.

The 14th Amendment bars from public office anyone who incites insurrection. An entire world watched Donald Trump do just that — in real time. And he may be back in the Oval to finish destroying America, with a Tucker Carlson as propaganda minister.

This is an urgent plea for sentient citizens to steer a dis-United States away from collision courses with unimaginable consequences.

Over recent decades, I’ve watched a well-meaning but misguided America edge steadily toward Orwell’s Animal Farm. Today, as the world faces existential perils, the nation best equipped to confront them looks more like John Belushi’s Animal House.

Betsy Reed, the Guardian’s U.S. editor, put it mildly: “I think the media faces a real risk of fostering an obsessive focus on (Joe Biden’s) age to the exclusion of a lot of other issues that are equally if not more salient.” More directly: Wake the Fuck Up!

Biden is the most effective president in my lifetime, considering the time bombs left for him to face against stacked odds. He is decent, empathetic and speaks in whole sentences. Still, too many Americans base judgments on bias, single issues, misperception and a drumbeat of lies.

Imagine the near future when artificial “intelligence” — without human sensibilities or reason — will be able to diffuse simultaneously the exact same twisted truths among countless millions. Far-right broadcasters and “news” purveyors are close to that already.

Far beyond the soul of America, the 2024 elections are about whether kids born anywhere today will face a soulless authoritarian world, with leaders who shorten the time until humans eventually hand over Earth to crocodiles and cockroaches.

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MIAMI — Heading to Miami airport for a plane to Paris and the real world after four months in America, a pleasant Uber driver from Colombia — let’s call her Marta — scared me senseless. Her driving was fine. It was our conversation.

In Washington, the belly of the beast, trusted old contacts were upbeat. Cherry trees blossomed; blast barriers were gone. Unarmed tourists thronged the Capitol where vengeance-obsessed Republican buffoons revealed themselves as unfit for reelection.

Then I flew down to South Florida, the beast’s lower colon. Marta had lived here for eight years. I asked her about Ron DeSantis’s diatribes against immigrants and Democratic initiatives to help struggling families like hers. She was oddly reticent.

I suspected she was wary about talking politics with a stranger, a troubling thought in a nation that champions free speech. But English is optional in southern Florida, and I tried again in Spanish. That sparked a rapid-fire 40-minute soliloquy.

“I love DeSantis almost as much as Donald Trump,” she said. “My family is devoutly Catholic, and they share my values. I don’t want school to turn my daughter into a homosexual. We Latinos believe in God and freedom.” Ay Dios mío.

If decent but credulous people like Marta cannot see that the Republicans’ Golden Calf and other bovine buttheads are playing them for fools, the stench of cow flop in America could be permanent after elections only 18 months away.

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