AFTERNOON: What Lisa Rubin said to Willie!

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2024

Old ways disappear: Journalistically speaking, we'd call it a moment that was.

Yesterday, opening statements were delivered at the Trump hush money / election corruption trial. When we left off this morning, Donald J. Trump had somehow "corrupted the 2016 election" (New York Times) by keeping the electorate from hearing a 30-year-old bogus story.

How dare he? He'd kept us from hearing an unflattering story which was untrue, bogus, false! According to the construction atop the Times' front page, we the people needed to hear that untrue story before we could know how to vote! 

Truth to tell, our high-end, mainstream press corps logic has functioned in similar ways for an extremely long time. Soon it was this very morning, and Morning Joe was on.

At 6:07 a.m., Willie Geist introduced Lisa Rubin to report on yesterday's session. To watch the entire segment which ensued, you can start by clicking here.

Rubin is a good, decent person. The initial exchange in question started off like this:

GEIST (4/23/24): Lisa, you're in the overflow room yesterday, watching all of this, kind of keeping track of Donald Trump's facial gestures and perhaps nodding off. What was your big takeaway yesterday from Day One?

According to Willie, Rubin had been keeping track of Trump's facial gestures and signs of his nodding off. When he sought her main takeaway, Rubin responded with this:

RUBIN (continuing directly): The big takeaway is that this is a crime about falsification of business records. And yet, what the government seems to have the most evidence of is of the underlying conspiracy. 

What's still unknown to me is how they're going to prove Donald Trump's own involvement in the falsification of the business records with which he's been charged. 

So we heard a lot of previews of the evidence of the construction of the conspiracy—who was involved in it, who will place Donald Trump with the knowledge and intent to commit election related crimes. What I didn't hear as much about is how Donald Trump then directed the coverup thereafter. 

So far, so journalistic! She seemed to be describing a possible shortfall of evidence, as indicated by the prosecutors' opening statement.

According to Rubin, the prosecutors hadn't shown how they plan to prove that Trump was involved in the falsification of the business records. Presumably, if the prosecutors can't prove that, their desire to tag Trump with 34 felonies will pretty much fall apart.

With facial features gone and forgotten, thar's how Rubin started. This was her account, as a journalistic observer, of the relevant facts.

So far, Rubin was coloring inside traditional lines. Below, you see what she said next:

RUBIN (continuing directly): For example, Willie, there is a 2017 Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Michael Cohen where the prosecution says they cemented the repayment deal.  How are they going to prove that? 

One, through the testimony of Michael Cohen. But I was looking yesterday to hear how else are they going to prove that? 

They say they have a photograph of the two gentlemen at that meeting. They also have invoices days afterwards, and then a couple of days after that the first payment to Michael Cohen. But I was hoping to hear that they have a lot more than that...

Say what? Rubin was hoping to hear that the prosecutors "have a lot more [evidence] than that?"

Just like that, Rubin seemed to move from reporting to rooting—to rooting for a conviction. Continuing from above, here's how she continued from there:

RUBIN (continuing directly): ...But I was hoping to hear that they have a lot more than that—somebody who was also at the meeting, who overheard the meeting, who placed some of these documents in front of Donald Trump, heard his comments about it. 

I didn't hear that yesterday. I'm hoping that we hear prosecutors have a lot more about the back end of the deal, as they do—as much as they do about the front end of it.

By now, we'd come a long way from facial gestures. Rubin said she hopes that prosecutors have a lot more evidence against Donald J. Trump than they seemed to signal yesterday. 

She's openly rooting for a conviction, as is everyone else on the slacker, joke-infested primetime end of this corporate Blue America clan.

In our view, that presentation by Rubin was remarkably undisguised. In our view, we're looking at the wages of "segregation by viewpoint"—at the fruits of creating journalistic clans where everyone shares a point of view and takes turns giving it voice.

(Including slippery claims about the doorman and bogus claims about the reason(s) why Cohen went to jail.)

 As on Fox, so too on MS—everyone agrees with everyone else during primetime broadcasts. Before too long, everyone is openly rooting for their preferred view to prevail. 

No one's assortment of claims and jokes will ever come under challenge. In Pundit A says something bogus, Pundit B repeats it.

A nation can always choose to run its news orgs this way. If you think this leads to good results, we'll offer the standard remedy:

Go ahead! Take a good look around!

Rubin seemed to sense a possible shortage in the evidence against Trump. She could have offered that observation as her main takeaway and just left it at that.

Instead, she powered ahead and shared her dream. It's what they do on the Fox News Channel. It's what we now do over here.

Human nature moves us this way. Does it lead to the best results?

An additional link: In order to watch that full exchange, click here for the Morning Joe site. After that, click on the video with this title:

What you missed on Day 5 of Trump's hush money trial.