"Cable news" covers the Rittenhouse trial!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2021

The cherry-picking is general: As of Tuesday night, we hadn't been following the Rittenhouse trial.

That night, we were surprised to hear that the trial was going poorly for the prosecution. More specifically, we were surprised to hear that said on CNN, first by reporter Sara Sidner, then by guest analyst Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

Speaking with CNN's Erin Burnett, Sidner said that the videotape from the night in question was turning out to be "the defense's best evidence." Most strikingly, Sidner also said this:

"At times, the prosecution witnesses did as much for the defense as they did for the prosecution."

Later, Burnett threw to Rawlings-Blake, a former defense attorney and the former mayor of Baltimore. Rawlings-Blake offered this:

RAWLINGS-BLAKE (11/9/21): I think going into this case, we were given the impression that the prosecution's case was a lot stronger than it is, as we've seen. You should never be in the position as a prosecutor that your best evidence, your best witness, that video, is offering to the jury reasonable doubt. 

Sidner and Rawlings-Blake agreed. The videotape was helping the defense—but so was the testimony by the prosecution's witnesses!

We were surprised to hear this on CNN, a "cable news" channel now strongly inclined to advance the Storylines which are preferred by our own blue tribe. 

We might have expected to hear this on Fox. But this was CNN!

What will the jury end up deciding? We have no idea. 

For ourselves, we'd be disinclined to convict, though we haven't seen all the testimony. Also this:

As a general matter, we're disinclined to hope and pray that people, even teen-aged people, will get frog-marched to jail.

How will the jury rule? We have no idea. We can offer this assessment of the cable news coverage in the past few days:

The cherry-picking has been general. Beyond that, so has the ugliness of many tribunes within our own liberal tribe.

We hadn't been following the trial until we heard those surprising assessments. We've seen a lot of the "coverage" since then. 

In our view, the ugliest, most repulsive conduct has come from people who play the game On Our Own Liberal Side. On balance, we'd have to say that the cherry-picking and the ugliness have been worse Over Here.

In our view, the behavior has been ugly and bad, especially on CNN and on Morning Joe. That said, we also watched Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. Below, you see a few examples of the bullshit we've seen: 

Later that same night: Tucker Carlson

How bad were things for the prosecution? That same Tuesday night, we watched a lengthy presentation by Tucker Carlson.

We hadn't watched his program in months. But it has become painful to watch the cable stars on MSNBC and CNN. 

For whatever reason, we flipped over—and we're glad we did. We were treated to extensive video footage from the trial—but also to absurd illogic from the cable star Carlson himself.

Let's start with the footage:

Is it possible that the jury will agree with Rittenhouse's plea of self-defense? We don't know what's going to happen, but below, you see part of the testimony by one of the prosecution witnesses.

The witness in question is Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, one of the three people Rittenhouse shot that night. He was one of the prosecution witnesses to whom Sidner and Rawlings-Blake had referred as they spoke with Burnett.

Grosskreutz was also armed, and was also out in the streets, late on the night in question. As we saw on Carlson's show, here's part of the way his testimony went that day under questioning by defense attorney Corey Chirafisi:

CHIRAFISI (11/9/21): That’s a photo of you, yes?

GROSSKREUTZ: Yes. 

CHIRAFISI: That is Mr. Rittenhouse? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct. 

CHIRAFISI: Now, you would agree your firearm is pointed at Mr. Rittenhouse, correct? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Yes. 

[...]

CHIRAFISI: Okay. So, when you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct. 

CHIRAFISI: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun—now your hands down, pointed at him—that he fired, right? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct.

Oof. That was part of the testimony to which Sidner and Rawlings-Blake had referred. In that testimony, Grosskreutz said that Rittenhouse hadn't fired at him until he himself advanced on the lad and pointed his own gun at him.

It was easy to see why that testimony would be helpful for the defense. Carlson aired other footage from that day's testimony which cut in the defendant's favor.

That said, you'll rarely see a presentation on Carlson's program in which information or evidence isn't quickly subsumed by Carlson's overstatements and illogic. After playing the tape of what Grosskreutz said, Carlson excitedly offered this:

CHIRAFISI: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun—now your hands down, pointed at him—that he fired, right? 

GROSSKREUTZ: Correct.

[End of videotape]

CARLSON: So that's kind of it right there, that's pretty much the end of the trial. Because when someone runs up and points a loaded gun in your face, you are allowed to shoot that person. That is called self-defense. That's the rule. It has been the rule throughout human history, in every society on Earth since people lived in caves. 

"That's pretty much the end of the trial?" You can't get dumber than that.

In fact, Grosskreutz was the third person Rittenhouse shot that night. Even if jurors decide that Rittenhouse shot Grosskreutz in self-defense, that has nothing to do with charges stemming from the first two people Rittenhouse shot, each of whom was killed.

We saw a lot of instructive footage on Carlson's show that night. Along with that, the deluge—Carlson's inevitable gong-show, an analysis which would be quite misleading for viewers who trust the star.

Thursday evening: Anderson Cooper

In the next few days, we saw performances on CNN and Morning Joe which struck us as ugly, evil, massively cherry-picked, destructive, demeaning, disgraceful.

We thought the behavior by Joe Scarborough and Claire McCaskill was little short of a disgrace. In our view, Professor Brooks' musings about "the old-fashioned slave patrols" only gets more tragic, and less sane, the further along he goes.

In our view, the spinning and dissembling were general, as was the bloodlust put on display by the various millionaires. Their behavior in these past few days has been an anthropology lesson and an indictment of our tribe.

For today, we'll only note what happened on Anderson Cooper's show. "Coop" had scored an interview with Grosskreutz himself. What happened was remarkable.

All in all, Grosskreutz has established himself as the Aaron Rodgers of the Rittenhouse trial. After delivering the sworn testimony we've posted above, he went on Thursday's Good Morning America and basically took it all back:

STRAHAN (11/11/21): Here you're allowed to say whatever you feel like you need to say. So you're saying that you actually didn't—you weren't pointing your gun at him. Is that what you're saying?

GROSSKREUTZ: That's absolutely what I'm saying, yes.

Behaving like the apocryphal potted plant, Michael Strahan let that flip-flop go. Or was it simply edited that way? To watch the interview, click here.

That night, Anderson Cooper interviewed Grosskreutz and pretended to challenge him on this instant self-contradiction.

You can check the transcript here. We'd say it's fairly obvious that Aaron Rodgers is writing Grosskreutz's stuff—and that people like Cooper are inclined to let this sort of thing go.

(Question: Has anybody told the judge about what Grosskreutz has been saying?)

We humans never were "the rational animal," the way we've always said. That basic fact has been clearly established during this long, stupid week.

We think McCaskill and Scarborough have been indecent, deranged. We think the Harvard professor behaved much as you might expect. 

Do we hear fire bells in the night? Is that the source of our fears?

We're afraid that voters all over the country can See Us As We Are. We think Cuomo and Lemon should be off the air, but mainly we wonder if a large continental nation like ours can survive a plague of "journalistic" locusts producing an epistemic Babel of this ever-devolving type.

We can see The Others when they behave in these ways, as they constantly do. As has always been true with our species' tribes, it seems that we can't see ourselves!

Full disclosure: We watched Hannity discuss the trial last night. 

He was much less ridiculous than the always ridiculous Carlson was. In our view, he was much more informative than the gruesome dissemblers and cherry-pickers so widely observed Over Here.