THE ROAD TO HELPFUL: Charles Blow does get one thing right!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2023

Stormy Daniels 33, Tyre Nichols 6: As a general matter, it seems to us that Charles Blow's reactions tend to be unhelpful.

That said, there's no ultimate way to measure such things. Our instincts concerning Blow's work may not be right.

At any rate, we'd have to say that Blow pretty much got something right in yesterday's New York Times column. He opened with his standard fury—but he did seem to get something right:

Tyre Nichols’s Death Is America’s Shame

The spectacle of a televised countdown to the showing of the video in which Tyre Nichols was savagely beaten by Memphis police officers doesn’t just theatricalize Black death; it is a damning indictment of American perversion.

It was horrific, as promised, but unfortunately not singularly so. It was instead yet another data point in a long line of videos showing the torturing of Black bodies by the police. It was more snuff porn with Black victims, in a country becoming desensitized to the violence because of its sheer volume.

As we noted yesterday, that's the way the column started. Are such declamations helpful? We're inclined to think they aren't.

Briefly, let's review:

On the day he entered the White House, Donald J. Trump described a (vastly overwrought) state of "American carnage." In yesterday's column, Blow went the former president one better:

He started with "American perversion," then continued on from there.

We could always be wrong! But we'll guess that such sweeping denunciations don't help us get anywhere. We'll guess they aren't real helpful.

As he continued, Blow indicted the nation's whole population, except perhaps himself. As he continued, he started calling the roll of those who simply don't care:

BLOW (continuing directly): America—and the world—had the realization that police violence was a problem, and then it simply walked away before the work was done and the war was won.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the historic summer of protest that followed, police killings of American citizens didn’t decrease; they increased. What fell away were the evanescent allies, poll-chasing politicians and cooped-up Covid kids who had used the protests as an opportunity to congregate.

A bunch of "cooped up Covid kids" had walked away from the fight. So had the "poll-chasing politicians"—but then, so had pretty much everyone else:

BLOW (continuing directly): Even Black people’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement eventually began to fall.

And as Americans shifted to other priorities like politics and the economy, the broader public became desensitized to police killings, or it callously started to see the police killings as unfortunate but ultimately acceptable byproducts of much-needed increased policing at a time of rising crime.

Even black people seemed to be part of the problem as the broader public callously shifted its view.

As a general matter, we'd have to guess that such approaches may not be especially helpful. Especially at times of vast tribal division, we'd have to guess that such declamations may tend to harden the tribal lines defining the tribal war.

In fairness, though, we'd have to say that Blow got one thing pretty much right in yesterday's angry column. As he begged for greater attention to "police killings of American citizens"—also, to what he called "the torturing of Black bodies by the police"—there plainly was one part of the American public who didn't much seem to care.

For us, the heads of this group first popped out of their hole at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon. Even as Blow was begging for more attention to the killing of Tyre Nichols, Nicolle Wallace introduced some of "our favorite reporters and friends"—and they spent the next 37 minutes discussing Stormy Daniels!

Eventually, the reporters and friends got around to the killing of Nichols. But that one segment was rather brief, and after the two-hour program returned was back to our tribe's favorite cable news product:

Trump Trump Trump Trump jail!

Was this reaction unique to Wallace's program? Actually, no, it wasn't.

Last evening, at 9 P.M., Rachel Maddow showed up on our TV screen for her now-weekly appearance. From 9 o'clock straight through to 9:37, with only a four-minute break for commercials, she talked about Stormy Daniels and Donald J. Trump and about nothing and no one else.

Starting at 9:41, she offered a six (6) minute segment about the killing of Tyre Nichols. This included an amazingly perfunctory pseudo-interview with the head of the Memphis NAACP.

By that time, it was Stormy 33, Memphis 6 on the Maddow Show! On the brighter side, we got to see some of Rachel's most widely loved clowning techniques as she pretended to be embarrassed by such things as the deeply embarrassing way she was forced to say the word "affair."

(This gong show never stops.)

Stormy Daniels is doing fine, Rachel oddly assured us right at the start of the program. Soon, she introduced us to some new fun—for example, to the difference between "bimbos" and "himbos."

The beloved TV star played the fool in the way our blue tribe loves. As she did, she ran up the score, which stood at 33-6 by her program's end.

This morning, the same thing happened! On Morning Joe, Mika and her collection of sidekicks opened the program with—who else?—Stormy Daniels! They offered a 16-minute discussion of Daniels, followed by an 8-minute discussion of the Memphis police and the death of Tyre Nichols.

As it turned out, that eight minutes was pretty much all she wrote. At 7 o'clock sharp, Mika kicked off a second discussion of Stormy. This discussion ran 11 minutes. By that time, the score on Morning Joe stood like this:

 Stormy Daniels 27, Tyre Nichols / Memphis 8

Make no mistake! This represents a business decision by our tribe's cable news network. They're serving us the cable news product they feel, and most likely know, that we want to consume.

They seem to feel that we don't really care all that much about Memphis and the like. We want a chance to amuse ourselves with talk about Trump's "affair," and with sugarplums of Donald J. Trump being frog-marched to jail.

For the record, what inspired all the new talk about Daniels, the "feminist icon" who blackmailed Trump into giving her $130,000 in hush money in the fall of 2016? 

(Otherwise, she said she would blab about the one (fully consensual) sexual experience she says she had with the overweight mogul back in 2006?)

What inspired all the talk? It was a report in this morning's New York Times—a major newspaper whose news judgment vastly differs today from that of our cable news tribe.

In this morning's New York Times, Memphis appears at the very top of page A1. In the online edition of the Times, the report's twin headlines say this:

Initial Police Report on Tyre Nichols Arrest Is Contradicted by Videos
The police report was the latest instance in which video evidence offered a starkly different account of police violence than what officers had reported themselves.

In print editions, that report tops the Times' front page. 

Inside the paper, the National section starts on page A11. Starting on that very page, three other news reports about Memphis appear today:

Page A11: In 13 Minutes, 71 Clashing Commands and Escalating Brutality.

Page A11: Nichols Pulled Over for Police, But It Quickly Turned Violent

Page A12:  Two More From Force Face Scrutiny After Death

Memphis appears at the top of page A1. Inside the paper, Memphis consumes the whole of page A11, plus the vast bulk of page A12.

Where does Stormy Daniels turn up? She turns up in the single news report which launched a thousand cable news ships. 

That report appears on page A16, near the end of the National section. Concerning the matter devoutly to be wished, it includes such buzzkill as this:

RASHBAUM ET AL (1/31/23): The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.

A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.

Still, the developments compound Mr. Trump’s legal woes as he mounts a third presidential campaign...

Could the newly revived Daniels matter perhaps send Trump to jail? Even if a charge is brought, a conviction is no sure thing, the Times report reported. According to the Times, an indictment would be "a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory."

Could Donald J. Trump end up getting indicted because of the payments to Daniels? That topic appeared on page A18 of the New York Times—and all over blue tribe cable! 

As Maddow mugged and clowned and played the embarrassed little girl, the exciting Stormy Daniels "affair" ran up the score on the death of Nichols, much as Blow had suggested. On Maddow's clowncar of a broadcast, the score at the end stood like this:

Stormy Daniels 33, Tyre Nichols 6

We've tried to tell you something down through the many long years:

Despite our blue tribe's endless performances, some of our constituent groups may not always seem to care all that much about matters of racial justice and fairness.

That doesn't make them bad people, we've said. It makes them people people. But it often seems that we don't really care, though we're often quite good at performing.

You can't blame Blow for being angry about such manifestations. A person could fairly judge that such anger is fully justified.

Still and all, a question remains about Blow's declamation concerning American perversion:

Even if Blow's anger is understandable, are such presentations helpful?

Tomorrow: So many roads to unhelpful