Our Own Rhodes Scholar forgets to correct!

TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2021

Our Town is drowning in banal: We're so old that we can remember the DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS.

We refer to the highly successful branding scheme Our Own Rhodes Scholar, Rachel Maddow, ran for several years. 

You may recall the performance. The star would appear beneath a large sign which said this:

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

She would proceed to correct some utterly trivial mistake. As she did, she'd be bigly apologetic. Her penitence would be obvious. 

These performances went on for years. They would distract us from the fact that Our Own Rhodes Scholar actually didn't correct her genuine howlers.

Her scam concerning  the gender pay gap was a refusal-to-correct for the ages. But this silly game went on for years. In time, acolytes began turning up in comments sections, pushing her bogus claim for her:

Rachel always corrects her mistakes, these gullible marks would say.

Last Friday night, Rachel repeated a report by the Washington Post which later turned out to be false. That same report was equally false when it appeared in the New York Times, and when it was presented by NBC News.

By now, everyone knows the report was false. But because the (false) report put Rudy in a badly  compromised light, Our Town's various cable stars had thoroughly enjoyed it.

It wasn't the fault of Our Own Rhodes Scholar that the report was false. She didn't know the central claim was false when she kept returning to it.

That said, she cited the false report again and again on Friday's program. The statement was false each time.

Last Friday, our multimillionaire cable stars were pleasuring us that way. The next day, we cited their fatuous conduct:

First, they dreamed of locking Rudy up. After that, they dreamed of locking up Gaetz. This is what these banal beings now think of as "the news."

Over the weekend, the three news orgs we named all corrected their false reports. By now, everyone knows that this pleasing claim was wrong:

MADDOW (4/30/21): The Washington Post reported last night that Mr. Giuliani was warned in advance by the FBI that the people he was in contact with and trying to work with this on were connected to Russian intelligence. He was given a defensive briefing by the FBI in 2019 that he was being used or that he was part of a Russian intelligence operation targeting the U.S. election. After getting that defensive briefing, he went ahead with it anyway.

"After getting that defensive briefing, he went ahead with it anyway?" Maddow kept returning to this pleasing claim during the middle third of her program.

By now, everyone knows that no such briefing ever occurred. The Washington Post got it wrong. So did the New York Times, and so did NBC News.

All three orgs have issued corrections—somewhat crabbed and grudging corrections, but corrections all the same. 

But Our Own Rhodes Scholar did no such thing last night.  Throughout the course of her show, Giuliani wasn't mentioned. That DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS sign was never seen at all. 

Don't get us wrong! Everyone pushed that false claim Friday night, on MSNBC and CNN. The crippled souls who perform the shows on these "cable news" channels keep selling imprisonment of The Others as the soul of Our Town's cable news. 

This is the porridge they've chosen to sell. They speak about little else.

Did anyone state a correction last night? We haven't yet run a full check. We're still trying to imagine how to present the transcript of Don Lemon's opening segment, in which Lemon made the dumbest presentation ever seen on cable news, calling names as he went.

These people aren't especially smart. They aren't always obsessively honest.

These people are amazingly rich. They don't want you to know about that, and they pretty much don't do corrections.

Our Town is sunk in the banal. Banality runs through Our Town's news orgs. 

It's hard to get away from the banal. While noting the craziness found Over There, does the banal define Our Town's soul?