Rachel Maddow’s very long, rather strange presentation!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2013

Whose kids do we care about: Thirteen minutes into the show, the analysts were still completely puzzled.

Rachel Maddow had gone on and on, discussing a long succession of cases in which her beloved news industry had shown good editorial judgment—good taste.

She started with “a series of violent attacks in the south of France” this past March (text below). Roughly ten minutes into her lecture, she was giving us the examples shown below.

We still had no idea why she was saying these things:

MADDOW (12/3/13): The press in this country is a free press. The press can do whatever we want. We can publish whatever we want. We can broadcast whatever we want.

But with that freedom comes great responsibility. The press is not just an amplifying system for raw information. We’re not just a means of disseminating information that we get access to by virtue of us being the press.

The press makes decisions all the time about what is right to publish and what is wrong to publish. What is a value to the public’s understanding of our world and news events, and what is not of value and would only cause unnecessary pain or harm if it were broadcast.

The name of the rape victim does not need to be part of the story, right? The bodies at the crash site do not need to be shown on the 6 o’clock news in order for you to understand that people were killed in that crash. The death of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, it can be described and not shown, even though his killers so desperately wanted it to be shown and shown again and shown again. It can be described. It does not have to be shown, particularly because that is what they wanted.

And these calls are not always simple. When Saddam Hussein was executed in Iraq, was the particular brutality of that execution just an obscenity that was beside the point of his death? Or was the sectarian screaming and the chaos and the brutality of that execution and his last moments actually an important part of the story? And for what his death would mean in an ongoing way both for Iraq and for us?

It’s no wonder they get paid so much, making those tough judgment calls!

By now, the analysts were twisting their heads like the RCA Victor dog. At 9:13, we glanced at the clock. We’ll admit it:

We still had no idea why we were being lectured this way. And then, at last, we were finally permitted to know! It had to do with the kinds of children Maddow cares about:

MADDOW: It is a very, very uncomfortable thing, but it is part of why the job of a free and responsible press is not just an important thing in a democracy, it’s a hard thing, and it’s a hard job, and it is hard to do well. You want the people who do it to be worthy of the responsibility that they have.

Tomorrow morning in a law office in Danbury, Connecticut, the news media will get access to the tapes of the 911 phone calls that were made in Newtown, Connecticut on the morning of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shootings. The state of the Connecticut and the prosecutor’s office and representatives of the victims’ families say they did not want those tapes to ever become available to the public. But the Associated Press sued to get access to the tapes, and a judge was ruled in the favor and appeals were dropped.

And so, tomorrow morning in Connecticut, the media for the first time will get those tapes. And then what?

Now, it’s up to the good judgment of the media to decide whether those tapes should be publicly broadcast. Whether what they will add to the public understanding of the massacre outweighs the additional, pointless trauma that playing those tapes publicly will undoubtedly cause to the families and the survivors in Newtown. Again, it was an Associated Press lawsuit that brought about the access to the tapes. It’s going to happen tomorrow morning.

Maddow thinks the press should withhold the tapes of the 911 calls made on that terrible day in Newtown. She may be right about that. We don’t have a strong opinion.

That said, she devoted the first twenty-one minutes of last night’s program to this topic. Thirteen minutes into the program, we still didn’t know what topic we were being lectured about.

To watch the tape of this segment, click here, then click again.

Rachel cares about the children of Newtown, as of course everyone should. She also cares about their parents. We’ve heard her discuss the problem posed by these tapes before.

Let us tell you who Maddow’s channel doesn’t care about. Her channel doesn’t care about our country’s “black” kids, or about their parents.

Yesterday, new international test scores were released. According to the Nexis archives, they were widely discussed on TV—on the ABC in Australia.

They weren’t widely discussed over here. Simply put, the liberal world doesn’t care about this topic, or about the kids whose lives are involved in this topic.

The liberal world, or the corporate cable version of same, doesn’t care about those children’s parents.

Last evening, the PBS Newshour devoted a segment to the new test scores. They even interviewed Andreas Schleicher, the PISA’s semi-cult-like “Andreas the Giant.”

We haven’t had the heart to review what was said. But a full segment was devoted to the topic.

Judging from the Nexis archives, the PISA wasn’t mentioned at all on The One True Liberal Channel last night. This topic isn’t on the playlist at the pseudo-liberal answer to Fox.

As we’ll start to show you tomorrow, the interests of black kids are deeply involved in this particular topic. But so what? At MSNBC, no one cares about these kids, or about their parents.

This point has been made abundantly clear time after time after time.

They care about the beautiful children of Newtown, as of course everyone should. But when it comes to those “other” kids, our corporate multimillionaire TV stars just flat-out don’t respond.

Rachel begged for good judgment today. How about some good judgment from her?

The start to a puzzling lecture: Rachel devoted twenty-one minutes to this topic. This is the way she began:

MADDOW: And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

In March of this past year, there was a series of violent attacks in the south of France. On March 11th, a French soldier was killed in an unprovoked, seemingly random shooting. Then, four days later, in a town about 30 miles away, two more French soldiers were ambushed and killed, again in a totally unprovoked attack. And then, four days later it happened again.

The third attack was an attack against a Jewish school in the city of Toulouse. A young rabbi and teacher was killed. He was trying to shield his own kids from the gunman at the time. Two kids of his children were killed alongside him at that day, as well as another 8-year-old girl from the school, and then the gunman got away.

Three attacks. There were March 11th, then March 15th, and then March 19th. In all three cases, it was a single gunman with a large caliber handgun on a motorcycle. And he kept his motorcycle helmet on throughout the attacks.

It turns out the gunman had mounted on his chest a video camera. He’d mounted on his chest a Go Pro, a Go Pro camera with which he recorded himself carrying out all of these shootings. After they finally figured out who the shooter was, after a huge nationwide manhunt, and a long armed stand-off with police in which the killer finally went down in a hail of bullets, after a huge standoff, a few days after, it was all over and police were doing the investigation, trying to figure out if he acted alone.

At 9:13, we still had no idea why we were hearing an endless succession of similar topics discussed. At considerable length, we even reviewed the tasteful way the press corps handled video of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Rachel really cares about this—about the children of Newtown. Concerning those “other” kids, not so much. Truth to tell, not at all.