One reason why that child's terrified...

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2020

...and why his mother's so scared: The New York Times has broken a very big story.

The report involves Nicholas Bils, a 36-year-old man who was mentally ill. He was shot in the back, in broad daylight, while running away from a sheriff's deputy in downtown San Diego.

Bils was shot in the back and killed. Initially, he'd been confronted by park rangers because they saw him practicing his putting in a park which was supposed to be closed.

Bils was shot in the back and killed. This very day, the New York Times has fearlessly broken the story.

Except wait! Bils was shot in the back and killed all the way back on May 1! You haven't heard a word about this, in the New York Times or anywhere else, for a reason which is blindingly obvious and quite significant, but is also perhaps a bit sensitive, mandated storyline-wise.

You haven't heard about this shooting death because the late Nicholas Bils was socially defined as "white." Yes, these "racial" categories—these journalistic groupings—are indeed part of "the world the slaveholders made." But especially in matters involving police shootings, one elementary fact has long been clear:

If the shooting victim is "black," the incident will be covered wall to wall. Routinely, journalists will be so upset about what has occurred that they will start inventing and disappearing facts to make the incident seem more heinous than it would otherwise seem.

By way of contrast, if the victim is "white" (or even, perhaps, Hispanic or Muslim), months will go by before you hear a word about it. Indeed, the chances are good you will never hear about the incident at all.

(This incident is being reported today because the deputy who shot Bils in the back has been charged with murder. News orgs didn't think this matter was worth reporting until this criminal charge came down.)

The basic journalistic practice here is inexcusable. That said, the examples of this selective journalistic treatment are legion. It's part of a pattern which has been especially pronounced even since the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

(National coverage of that incident began with a glaring factual error by the New York Times.)

The journalism involved in the practice is inexcusable. For today, we want you to think about the way this journalistic behavior has perhaps affected the life of a certain 7-year-old boy.

As we noted yesterday, that child is "terrified" because of the things his mother has told him. We'll assume his mother has told him those things because she herself is very scared.

Increasingly, news orgs are involved in printing material which heightens the sense that black men are being wantonly hunted down by police. This impression is vastly enhanced when the many incidents in which "white" people are shot and killed by police get swept down the memory hole at orgs like the New York Times.

In part, that 7-year-old is terrified, and his mother is very scared, because they hear only one thing. When the PBS NewsHour discusses the death of Breonna Taylor, all they see is John Yang, and then Judy Woodruff, willingly swallowing this:

YANG (6/16/20): Louisville has banned—in reaction to this, banned no-knock warrants. They called it Breonna's Law. How effective do you think that will be?

RITCHIE: I think it's good that we're stepping back to look at how those police officers came to be at her door and looking to interrupt one of the mechanisms that has resulted in her death and also in the death of—I can name five other black women killed by no-knock warrants, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, Alberta Spruill, Aiyana Stanley-Jones.

So, there's many—this is not the first time. And so I think that stopping no-knock warrants is important, and that we need to recognize that increasing the time that folks have to respond to 15 or 30 seconds or a minute, imagine someone backing on your door in the middle of the night. That's not enough time to understand what's going on either.

So, we need to maybe step further back and ask ourselves, why are people showing up at—police officers, armed police officers, showing up on people's doors to serve no-knock or short-knock warrants?

And I think then we need to look at the war on drugs, which is where those warrants came from and what brought those officers to Breonna's door that night.

No larger context was offered. When people like Woodruff and Yang are prepared to enable a gong-show like that, they're creating a world in which 7-year-olds end up terrified, and their mothers may be suffering under a type of misapprehension.

When we first reported that appalling NewsHour presentation, we also quoted something Jelani Cobb had recently said. Cobb had appeared on MSNBC's The Beat. This is what he'd said:

COBB (6/10/20): One other point that I have been making a lot, I have been making all the time, is that one of the reasons that this problem has been allowed to persist is that people have the perception that this is a black and brown problem.

But if you were to discard all of the incidents involving black and brown people, what you would find is, there are a heck of a lot of white people, unarmed white people, who are killed by police each year.

We have a fundamental problem with policing in this country, whose most extreme violent forms are witnessed in how we see black and brown people treated by law enforcement.

Cobb said lots of white people get shot and killed by police officers too! Almost no one ever says that. Under current rules of the road, we'd say it's barely allowed.

Not long ago, Wesley Lowery got a snootful and The Atlantic let him rip. He focused on police shootings in Minnesota, and on George Floyd's death.

His essay focused on Miski Noor, a Minneapolis activist, who was pictured in a pandemic mask which said, STOP SHOOTING BLACK PEOPLE. Along the way, he quoted Noor saying this:

“These systems were created to hunt, to maim, and to kill black people, and the police have always been an uncontrollable source of violence that terrorizes our communities without accountability,” Noor added. “Black communities have been and are living in persistent fear of being killed by state authorities.”

A certain picture was perhaps created in this way. When we checked at the Fatal Force site, the numbers we found were these:

People shot and killed by police officers in Minnesota, 2015 to present:
White people: 37
Black people: 10

Lowery didn't mention those numbers, even in a long essay.

In an ideal world, that would be 47 people too many. But that 7-year-old boy is terrified because he only hears about the ten, often in ways which substantially distort the circumstances in which they lost their lives.

That child is terrified because of revolutionary figures like Chairman Wes. Also, because of the very brave people at The Atlantic and at the New York Times.

LONGING FOR BETTER DISCOURSE: One-year-old boy shot and killed in New York!

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2020

The segregation of news: For unknown reasons, the New York Times decided to try it again.

In this morning's editions, Southall and Gold report on rising gun violence in New York City. For unknown reasons, their editors let them try to report some statistics.

The reporters focused on the shooting death, Sunday night, of a 1-year-old boy in a stroller. At one point, though, they presented some elementary data.

This is what occurred:

SOUTHALL AND GOLD (7/13/20): Davell’s death came during another grim weekend of gun violence in the city, where shootings in June and July are up sharply compared with the same period last year, a spike that has helped push the overall number for the year higher.

As of July 12, there had been 634 shootings in 2020, compared with 394 in 2019. At that pace, the city would top 800 shootings for the year. It would be the first time in three years that the city had reached that number.

Yes, that's what it actually says. That's what it says in our print edition. That's what it still says in the news otherwise significant news report which appears online.

As of yesterday, there have been 634 shootings in New York City this year. At that pace, the city will top 800 by the end of the year!

Yes, that's what the news report says. No, we didn't invent that.

As we've mentioned in the past, people do make mistakes. And in this case, to be perfectly fair, the statements we've highlighted are all technically accurate.

At the current pace, the city will indeed top 800 shootings this year. That said, at the current rate, New York City could very well top twelve hundred shootings this year! By our calculations, the current pace would produce a total of 1196 shootings.

We have no idea how the Times reporters, or perhaps their editor, settled on eight hundred shootings as the statistical benchmark. Nor do we know how they picked three years as the time span of highest relevance.

When did Gotham last experience 1200 shootings in a calendar year? We can't tell you that, and the Times report, as presented online, offers no link to any data.

We haven't forgotten that one-year-old boy, the one who was shot and killed in his stroller on Sunday night. We'll return to his death as we make our main point, but first, let's offer some context:

By "shootings," the Times reporters probably mean "shooting incidents" (as opposed to "shooting victims"). Those are separate categories in New York City's CompStat data, last week's version of which can be perused right here.

For the record, while "shooting incidents" are substantially up as compared to last year at this time, that CompStat report seems to say that the current number is 17.3% lower than the corresponding number at this point in 2010.

Strikingly, the current number is a walloping 78.3% lower than the corresponding number in 1993! The reporters stress the fact that city residents are alarmed by the current pace of shootings. But even at the current alarming pace, "shootings" in New York City are way down since that year.

That larger number of shootings occurred during the long high-crime era which produced, among other things, the 1994 crime bill. As we all can remember, high-spirited entities within our own tents used that bill, in 2016, to launch attacks against Candidate Clinton. Also, she had used a disfavored term—"super-predators"—on one occasion in 1996.

These highly visible attacks helped send Donald J. Trump to the White House. In such ways, our own occasionally fallible tribe has helped create our less than bravura new world, in which a one-year-old boy was shot and killed in Brooklyn this past Sunday night.

As a bit of an afterthought, here's what happened that night:

According to the Times report, that one-year-old boy, Davell Gardner Jr., was shot in the stomach as he sat in his stroller at a cookout in Brooklyn. "He died a short time later at a nearby hospital," the Times report says.

We saw a report about Davell Gardner's death just last night, on cable. For better or worse—quite often, for worse—we saw the report on a frequently gruesome Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Carlson mentioned the death of this one-year-old boy in his program's third minute. The final segment of the show concerned the rise in shootings in New York City, with general ruminations about the current state of the NYPD.

We mention this for a reason:

Carlson's program is reliably larded with ludicrous name-calling aimed st those of whom he disapproves, along with ridiculous editing of videotape and butchered versions of various people's public statements. Again and again, the journalistic standards put on display are an embarrassment and a mark of the times.

That said, you may see topics discussed on Carlson's show which you won't see discussed on the other two cable news channels. Last night, viewers heard about that shooting death, and about the rise in shooting incidents in New York City generally.

(CNN's transcripts show no sign of any such discussions from 6 PM Eastern through midnight. MSNBC's transcripts will show up sometime next month.)

On our own tribe's cable channels, a certain type of segregation may perhaps seem to exist. Shooting deaths will be discussed, at length, if the shooting was done by a police officer. Such shooting deaths count so much that cable hosts may even start to edit, alter or rearrange their accounts of the way these deaths occurred.

On the other hand, shooting deaths may not seem to matter much, or at all, if the're done by people who aren't police officers. If a kid if shot and killed in a civilian crossfire, it may not seem to matter on our own tribe's cable channels.

There is another way in which cable channels currently "segregate" news. Increasingly, people with differing points of view, or even with different points of emphasis, aren't likely to encounter each other on these carefully curated programs.

On CNN and MSNBC, you will increasingly see no guest who doesn't present the current approved Storyline, whatever it happens to be. Amazingly, this segregation of viewpoint and emphasis may be slightly less dominant on Fox at this point, although that's just a guess.

Nationwide crime has been on the decline for several decades. For our money, Kevin's Drum's analysis of this phenomenon has been one of the blogosphere's few great achievements to date.

Now, especially in urban settings, violence and shooting incidents seem to be on the rise again. Why haven't various municipalities been able to protect their children, and the parents of those children, from this kind of violence? Is there merit to a critique you may hear on Fox, in which you'll be told that the current black lives movement doesn't seem to focus enough on this type of shooting death?

We've been watching Carlson lately because we could no longer stomach Anderson Cooper and his endless Sarcasm/Storyline. We've occasionally glanced in on Laura Ingraham too.

As compared to Carlson, it seems to us that she has been much less ridiculous in her presentation of certain Fox-only themes and points of view. You will, of course, have to flip back to Lawrence when Dinesh D'Souza comes on.

During these sojourns, we've been struck by the segregation of cable news—by the sifting of what topics you'll see discussed, of what information you'll be given, depending on which channel you are watching.

Monday morning, Slate's Lili Loofbourow said she shares "the longing for better discourse." We were struck by one aspect of the essay she wrote about that topic. We may return to it tomorrow.

Last night, we were struck, once again, by where you have to go on cable to hear about one-year-old kids getting shot and killed in their strollers.

Could it possibly be, we asked, that our tribe was possibly wrong when it ranted, railed and carried on about the word that candidate used on that one occasion? Also, is it possible that our occasionally imperfect tribe is making misjudgments today?

Tomorrow: Paraphrase is amazingly easy, direct quotation is hard

Decent, good person speaks up in the Post!

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2020

That said, is this part of a pattern?: Of all the relevant articles we've read since the day George Floyd was killed, the person we've probably thought of most is that 7-year-old boy who lives in California.

That 7-year-old is terrified; he wants to leave the country. We read about him in an essay written by his mother, an essay republished by Slate.

In part, we'd say that 7-year-old is terrified because his mother is very scared. As you may recall, her essay started like this:

MCDONALD (6/15/20): I was 14 when Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers. I had no thoughts of kids, or how a parent protects them. But in households around the country, Black parents were having “The Talk” with their children: an intense, high-stakes training on the realities of racism designed to inoculate them against disproportionate police targeting and brutality.

My oldest child is now 7. A few nights ago, I was the one giving The Talk. We discussed George Floyd’s death. Even with my high-level, simplistic explanation, he understood and was brought to tears. He thought at first that I was speaking of the past, and I could see the fear on his face when I explained that this wasn’t “back then.” He asked a lot of tough questions about hate and racism, and ended by telling me he wants to leave the United States. He was terrified.

That's how the essay began. Of all the work we've read since George Floyd died, we've probably thought of that scared little boy the most.

Our question would be this:

Should that child be terrified? Also, should his mother be as scared as she seems to be?

Over here, within our own blue-voting tribe, that fear has almost become a sacrament by now. As Colbert King suggested last Saturday, guilt-stricken/algorithm driven mainstream journalists have perhaps been pushing that fear along hard.

That said:

Is it possible that this fear, and this terror, are perhaps being felt too deeply? Is it possible that many people are misassessing the likelihood that they, or one of their children, will be shot and killed by police?

Is it possible that six years of journalism—we're dating this to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin—have created a world in which people are making a misassessment? This is a question that's heavily fraught, but if you consider the interests of a 7-year-old who's terrified, we'll suggest that you should consider giving that question a bit of your time.

We thought of that 7-year-old early this morning when we read an essay from the Outlook section of yesterday's Washington Post. The essay was written by a very good, very decent person who is curretly working long shifts as a doctor trying to save people who are sick with the coronavirus.

In our assessment, the likelihood is zero that this young doctor is trying to mislead anyone. Still, we thought of that terrified 7-year-old when we read the passage posted below.

The writer is an especially good, decent person, but we're not sure that the highlighted passage should have appeared in this form:

HOLMES (7/12/20): No single incident compelled me to wear scrubs everywhere. However, one night in the spring of 2019 after a long day at the hospital stands out...On my way home, around 2 a.m., I found myself behind a black car with tinted windows traveling less than 10 mph on a deserted two-way street. After this continued for a couple of blocks, I decided to pass the car. As soon as I did, blue lights came on, and I pulled over. The car pulled alongside me. Both passenger windows rolled down.

I immediately thought of Stephon Clark, who had been shot one year earlier in his grandmother’s backyard.

We'll strongly suggest that you read the whole thing. The writer's story continues from there.

We assume that the writer's story is completely accurate. That includes his account of what he immediately thought when he was pulled over, for no apparent reason, by New York City police that night.

We're sure that is what the writer "immediately thought." We aren't sure that the Washington Post should have published that truncated account of Stephon Clark's death.

Here's why:

From that account, a reader might think that Clark was sitting in his grandmother's yard when Sacramento police appeared on the scene and shot him for no reason. A reader might get that impression because that account omits the basic facts which surround that unfortunate death.

We don't believe that the writer of this essay was trying to mislead anyone at all. But this "elimination of surrounding detail in the case of police shooting death" has become a whole new literary form in the past six years—a literary form which may be leading many people to misassess the likelihood that they will be shot and killed by police officers for no earthly reason.

The essay was written by Arturo Holmes Jr. He sounds like the kind of person others should get to admire.

But when we read that truncated account of that shooting death, we thought of that terrified little boy, and we thought of his mother, who seems to be very scared.

Misassessments of danger are common. In the years since Trayvon Martin's death, has this new literary form terrified 7-year-old children so much that they want to leave the country?

We plan to explore this topic further. It's an extremely painful topic, that's true. But should that little boy be that scared?

More ruminations to come.

Also deemed very important at Slate: Breaking news on another key topic has just been published by Slate:

RICH JUZWIAK / JULY 13, 2020 / 3:24 P.M.
I’m a Conservative Woman Who Doesn’t Believe in Casual Sex
I’m horny constantly.

People, we're just asking! Does anyone ever get tired of the bad faith, the limited judgment and the cheap thrills of various kinds promulgated by the people who are hanging on, however they can, at bad-faith "news sites" like Slate?

LONGING FOR BETTER DISCOURSE: Journalist longs for better discourse!

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2020

Reporting statistics is hard: In the very first thing we read today, Slate's Lili Loofbourow said it:

"I get the longing for better discourse. I even share it."

Officially, everyone longs for better discourse. But better discourse is hard.

Actually, Loofbourow's essay was perhaps the second thing we read today. At present, the first thing we consult each morning is the Washington Post's tabulation of the previous day's number of coronavirus deaths nationwide.

This morning, the Washington Post is reporting yesterday's number. That number may seem relatively low. Here are the recent figures:

Daily deaths, nationwide, due to coronavirus
July 8: 897
July 9: 876
July 10: 849
July 11: 725
July 12: 483

It may appear that the number of deaths is going down. By most lights, that would be a misinterpretation.

Yesterday, only 483 deaths were recorded nationwide—but the key word there is "recorded." You see, the daily number reported by the Post (and by everyone else) isn't a measure of the actual deaths which occurred on the particular day in question.

Instead, it's a record of the number of deaths which were officially recorded that day—and official reporting tends to slow over every weekend. The deaths which don't get reported on weekend days are then folded into the daily numbers as the workweek proceeds.

With that explained, now understand this: Yesterday's 483 reported deaths actually raised the 7-day rolling average of daily deaths nationwide.

As of Sunday morning, the average number of daily deaths stood at 673.6 (July 5-July 11). As of today, with yesterday's 483 figured in, the 7-day average rose to 711.4 deaths per day over the past seven days!

That happened because yesterday's number—483—replaced a much smaller number—217—from the previous Sunday. At any rate, and unambiguously, we've recorded a daily average of 711.4 deaths nationwide over the past seven days.

In the last seven days of June, the average number of daily deaths stood at a much lower 538.7 (June 24-June 30). Over the past week, the average has steadily been going up, and will likely continue to do so.

This very morning, over at Slate, Loofbourow announced her longing for a better discourse. We'll be discussing impediments to that better discourse all week.

All week, we'll be discussing the hard parts. Today, we'll start with the math.

"Math is hard," Talking Barbie once famously said. Talking Ken, her slacker consort, didn't challenge his misshapen companion's claim.

In truth, math is routinely very hard for the stars of cable news. More specifically, reporting statistics seems to be hard for this narrative-driven assemblage.

Let's discuss the ways they do, and the ways they don't, report coronavirus deaths. Also, let's do a quick drive-by on current reporting of "cases."

On anti-Trump cable, one prime storyline goes like this: The United States is number one in the world, compared to all other nations, on coronavirus deaths.

That's technically accurate, but only if you don't adjust for size of population.

Our apparently impaired president, Donald J. Trump, doesn't adjust for population when he says we've done the most testing in the world. Our cable stars—people like Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow—don't adjust for population when they hand you the storyline in which the United States leads all nations in deaths.

In these ways, two rival tribes are pleasured with rival Storyline. In the process, the three national figures we've named are behaving in a way which justifies Barbie's extremely frank statement.

How should coronavirus deaths be reported? If we're comparing the United States to other nations, or even to the E.U., we'll suggest two major ways:

You can report the total number of coronavirus deaths to date: You can report the total number of deaths in various countries to date! That said, it makes no sense to do this unless you adjust for size of population—and if you do that, the United States isn't number one, although it may be on some glorious future day.

If you adjust for population, we simply aren't number one in total deaths to date. For current data on deaths to date, see yesterday's report.

That's one way to report such deaths. Another way would be this:

You can report the current average number of daily deaths: You can report the current average number of daily deaths! This statistic wouldn't show how many people have died overall. Instead, and possibly more to the point, it would show how many people are dying right now, on a daily basis.

You can report the current average number of daily deaths! In graphic form, Kevin Drum does this on a daily basis, though only with respect to eight countries other than the United States.

Here again, these comparisons only make sense if you adjust for size of population. Drum's daily graphic does.

Anderson Cooper could do this too! And by the way—this would be an interesting, journalistically respectable way to show how badly our nation has done at defeating the virus, as compared to nations around the world.

Needless to say, Cooper doesn't do this. We can think of two principal reasons:

Number one, math is hard, just as Barbie said. It's easier not to bother with this, assuming it has even occurred to Cooper's staff to present such important data.

Number two, Cooper seems to be happy with pure Storyline (and he's a bit of a slacker). He simply says we're worst in the world, and his daily effort is done.

In a slightly different world, people would be very unhappy with people like Cooper and Maddow. People would insist on the delivery of journalistically respectable information, not on pure Storyline.

In our world, the professors abandoned the discourse a long time ago. They never say boo about matters like this, and the journalists routinely are clowns.

How does our floundering nation stand, as compared to other nations, when it comes to current daily deaths? As you can see from Drum's daily graphic, we're roughly even with the U.K. and Sweden; we're doing substantially better than Mexico.

That said, such well-known countries as Germany, France and Italy have virtually ended daily deaths, with Canada seeming to close in on that goal. We're considering the eight other countries Drum reviews, but many other developed nations have wrestled these deaths to the ground.

If a cable star like Cooper would get off his multimillionaire corporate asp, he could compile an array of such statistics, then show them to the American people. Such data would let his viewers see how pathetic our national performance has been, right to the present day.

That said, Donald J. Trump's former caddie is a journalistic slacker. He's content to hand you Storyline, then return to one of the several mansions he's purchased with large corporate cash.

Concerning "cases," let us quickly refer you to the featured report atop page A1 of today's New York Times. Hard-copy triple headline included, that news report starts like this:

15,000 NEW CASES IN FLORIDA IN DAY BREAK A RECORD

SURPASSING NEW YORK

Dozens of States Averse to Restrictions See Sharp Surge

Florida on Sunday reported the highest single-day total of new coronavirus cases by any state since the start of the pandemic, with more than 15,000 new infections, eclipsing the previous high of 12,274 recorded in New York on April 4 amid the worst of its outbreak.

The number reflects both increased testing and a surge in transmission of the virus that has strained hospitals, led to shortages in a key antiviral drug and amplified fears about the pace the state lifted restrictions on movement and commerce. And it is a new red mark on the nation’s floundering efforts to combat the virus.

The top two headlines produce excitement; they also advance Storyline. In those two headlines, as in that opening paragraph, we're told that Florida reported a higher number of new "cases" yesterday than the hard-hit state of New York ever did!

That statement is technically accurate. But in paragraph 2, we're told that the Florida number reflects "increased testing" along with a surge in transmissions. That tells us that we're comparing a big bag of apples to a smaller basket of oranges when we compare Florida's (recorded) new cases yesterday to the state of New York's (recorded) new cases way back when testing was much more limited.

"Cases" is a shaky statistic, especially when used to make comparisons over substantial amounts of time. Here's why:

No one knows how many "new infections" really occurred in Florida yesterday. The number the Times reported is simply the number that was identified by an official test.

How much less testing was going on back in April, when the state of New York was the epicenter of the pandemic? We don't have the slightest idea, and the Times' comparison doesn't make a huge amount of sense unless you know such things.

At least in theory, everyone long for better discourse. By way of contrast, what we're handed tends to be Storyline.

Today, we've noted that basic statistics, a branch of math, can be very hard. Tomorrow, it's on to a point we first made in 1999:

Paraphrase can be wondrously easy, quotation amazingly hard.

Tomorrow: Who needs quotation?

The size of those two states: In this, as in so many situations, comparing "cases" state-to-state doesn't really make much sense unless you adjust for population.

In this instance, Florida's population seems to be a little more than ten percent larger than that of the state of New York. By the norms of modern discourse, that means they're exactly the same!

Cooper, Weir discuss deaths in the U.S., Brazil!

SUNDAY, JULY 12, 2020

Lack of elementary journalistic/analytical skill: In yesterday's post, we should have mentioned the difference between the dueling front-page headlines.

We mentioned the struggles in the New York Times. We didn't mention the Washington Post. Below, you see the dueling front-page headlines from the two major newspapers:

New York Times headlines (online):
Daily Virus Death Toll Rises in Some States
In several states where the virus has surged in recent weeks, the death toll is edging up. That may end a long period in which the national toll has steadily declined.

Washington Post headline (print edition):
Once falling, daily death toll from virus rises anew

The New York Times still wasn't sure that the nationwide decline in deaths had ended. The Washington Post was willing to say that the death toll was rising again.

(It was clear, within its report, that the Post was referring to the nationwide death toll.)

As of this morning, the 7-day rolling average stands at 673.6 deaths per day nationwide. That's where the nationwide average stood way back on Bloomsday—way back on June 16, almost a month ago.

As of yesterday morning, it was already easy to say that the decline had ended. As of today, it's hard to deny that daily deaths actually seem to be rising:

(On the morning of July 1, the average number of daily deaths stood at 538.7. Today, the 7-day average is roughly 25 percent higher than that.)

As of yesterday morning, the New York Times still wasn't ready to say that the decline was over. Then too, there was CNN's July 9 report, a rebroadcast of which we watched on CNN last night.

At issue is the lack of statistical sophistication within our upper-end press corps. By "lack of statistical sophistication," we actually mean lack of the most elementary journalistic / analytical skills.

Remember, this is anthropology! We don't mean this as a criticism of the essential decency, or the essential worth, of the individuals involved.

But Thursday night's brief report about Brazil featured a rolling and remarkable lack of basic journalistic skill. Anderson Cooper led it off, and then he threw to Bill Weir:

COOPER (7/9/20): More now on Brazil and President Bolsonaro, who has mocked the virus and was infected by it. Sadly, his was just one of tens of thousands of new cases in recent days.

Brazil now ranks second only to the United States in confirmed cases and in deaths, and in the hills outside Sao Paulo, drone footage tells the story:

Row after row of newly prepared graves. None likely will stay empty for long. The way things are going, none will be the last.

CNN's Bill Weir is in the capital city, Brasilia. He joins us now. So Bill, what's the latest there and what's being done to try to deal with this spread?

WEIR: Well, the latest, Anderson—about another 40,000 or so confirmed cases and another 1,100 fatalities. They are closing in on close to 70,000 tragic deaths due to COVID-19.

But the testing here, you've got to keep in mind, is one-sixth of what's happening in the United States. So most experts think those numbers are vastly under-reported by a factor of 10.

And as we've seen, and as we've been discussing, you know, from South Korea to Sweden, this virus has really laid bare the strength of communities and the smarts of the people in charge. And it's no coincidence, I suppose, that number one and number two, and the worst categories these days, are led by sort of cult-of-personality leaders...

Weir continued a bit from there. In fairness, the journalists remembered to say that the cases and the deaths were not only "sad" but were also "tragic."

Still, consider what had been said:

Cooper fails to adjust: As he started, Cooper said this: "Brazil now ranks second only to the United States in confirmed cases and in deaths."

That's true, but only if we're talking about total numbers of confirmed cases and deaths to date. But if we make an obvious statistical adjustment—if we adjust for total numbers to date per million people—that statement isn't accurate.

(Would that statement be true if we were talking about current death rates per million people—average daily deaths per million? We have no idea, and you can be fairly sure that Cooper doesn't know either.

Bill Weir does adjust: Cooper was telling the preferred story, in which the United States is worst in the world under Trump.

Now, though, when Cooper threw to Weir, Weir made the type of adjustment for population Cooper hadn't made, although he didn't say so.

Weir started by saying this: "The testing [in Brazil] is one-sixth of what's happening in the United States." Based in part on a look at the data, we're assuming he meant the total number of tests to date, although he didn't specify.

The number of tests in Brazil, to date, is one-sixth the number of tests in the United States? That's true if you adjust for population. If you deal in absolute numbers, the number of tests in Brazil to date is one-eleventh the number in the United States.

(What's the current level of daily testing in these two large nations? We have no idea. Neither does anyone relying on CNN for information.)

Now we hit Weir's most striking statement. Based upon other things one hears on TV, this only creates confusion:

"The testing here...is one-sixth of what's happening in the United States. So most experts think those numbers are vastly under-reported by a factor of 10."

Most experts think the actual number of cases in Brazil is ten times the reported number? That assessment may be accurate, though we have no way of knowing.

That said, a few nights earlier, that's exactly what Dr. Irwin Redlener told Brian Williams about the actual number of cases in the United States! Redlener seemed to be applying an earlier statement by Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC.

With this, we offer a warning:

When you watch cable news, you're hearing Storyline. There's a vastly lesser interest in reliable, clear information.

For Cooper, the current storyline is this: Under President Donald J. Trump, everything here is the worst.

That's the basic storyline Cooper wants viewers to hear. For that reason, viewers are sarcastically told that we're number one in the world when it comes to deaths. Viewers are never shown such basic statistics as these:

Total deaths from coronavirus, per million population, as of July 12:
Belgium: 844
United Kingdom: 660
Spain: 607
Italy: 576
Sweden: 548
France: 460
United States: 415
[Chile, Netherlands, Peru, Ireland]
Brazil: 336

Using Weir's language, the U.S. and Brazil are only "number one and number two" in the world if you don't adjust for size of population. In fairness, that depends on what Weir was actually talking about, which remained unclear for every viewer and even, perhaps, for Bill Weir.

Make no mistake! Before this whole disaster is done, the United States may well be number one for deaths even adjusted for population. We say that because our daily deaths have started to rise once again, while many other countries seem to have wrestled daily deaths to the ground.

It would be interesting to see Cooper convey such elementary information to CNN's viewers. But CNN, and especially Cooper, have long since ceased to focus on the reporting of information, even basic information.

Cooper is almost all storyline now. He opens with sarcasm, and he rarely lets up. He's become a parody of a journalist—but as they say on cable TV, "This is CNN."

Meanwhile, at the Times, they still weren't sure if the decline in deaths was over! For what it's worth, the lead reporter for the report which generated those headlines is a Harvard grad.

Eventually, the Times report said this. We're prepared to believe that the editor did it:

Some officials have attributed the drop in deaths over the last few months to improvements in treatment for the virus. Doctors have more tools today than they did in the spring, including the use of remdesivir, an anti-viral drug that has been shown to shorten hospital stays though not reduce fatalities.

The drop in deaths has been attributed to treatments like remdesivir, an anti-viral drug which doesn't reduce fatalities! So it goes at the very top of our remarkable press corps.

The United States is, indeed, involved in a rolling disaster. All roads from that rolling disaster lead back to Donald J. Trump.

That said, Cooper's a bit of a rolling disaster too. Ask yourself two questions:

First question: To what extent does our actual number of new daily cases exceed our reported number of new daily cases?

It would be interesting to see that question hashed out. Unfortunately, that question lies several light years beyond the verdant planets, Sarcasm and Storyline, where Cooper now makes his homes.

Second question: How does our nation's current number of daily deaths (adjusted for population) compare to current numbers from other nations?

Those statistics would be grossly embarrassing for the United States. Those numbers would illustrate the size of our disastrous failure to function under President Donald J. Trump.

That said, you'll never see those numbers on CNN, and you aren't likely to see them in the Times. Those numbers would represent real information, and people like Cooper are happy to laze along feeding you pure storyline.

Put another way, those numbers would be hard. Cable news likes it easy.

CNN's multimillionaire hosts have amazingly few analytical skills. At present, the channel is serving you two major products: Sarcasm, Storyline.

Plus, those deaths are tragic and sad. They remember to inform us of that, as any sharp analysts would.

Full disclosure: We offer this as anthropology. This is the way our species actually functions, or so major experts have said.

The New York Times addresses the virus!

SATURDAY, JULY 11, 2020

Do you think this makes sense?: The New York Times has long been branded as our smartest newspaper.

Its reporters went to the finest schools. We all know these things.

This morning, on the paper's front page, three reporters tackle the current state of nationwide coronavirus deaths. The opening paragraph says this:

"The daily number of deaths from the coronavirus has risen recently in some of the nation’s most populous states, leaving behind grieving families and signaling a possible end to months of declining death totals nationally."

Signaling a possible end to months of declining death totals nationally? At present, the 7-day average for daily deaths nationwide stands exactly where it was three weeks ago, on June 20.

The decline is over, at least at this point. It shouldn't be too hard to see that.

We marveled at the difficulty the Times was having with this point, starting in its headlines. Then, we reached this passage:

"Some officials have attributed the drop in deaths over the last few months to improvements in treatment for the virus. Doctors have more tools today than they did in the spring, including the use of remdesivir, an anti-viral drug that has been shown to shorten hospital stays though not reduce fatalities."

In that first sentence, the reporters say the drop in deaths may have come from improvements in treatment. Then, they seem to cite one, and only one, of these tools:

It's remdesivir, an anti-viral drug that doesn't reduce fatalities!

This is front-page work in our smartest newspaper concerning the biggest health topic in the past hundred years. Can you see why credentialed experts keep telling us that we should tell you that it's all anthropology now?

Full disclosure: We suspect that the editor did it.

Colbert King remembers the dead!

SATURDAY, JULY 11, 2020

Should Roger Stone go to jail?: For our money, Colbert King's new column is more significant (see below).

That said, a different question dominated anti-Trump cable last night: Should Roger Stone go to prison?

For ourselves, we'd like to see fewer people in prison. We'd like to see fewer arrests.

Something else is true. You're allowed to hear it in this context, but only if you watch Fox:

Due to the virus, many others are being released from prison even as we speak. Even as the nationwide average daily death count rose again yesterday.

None of this tells us whether Stone should have gone to prison next week. Roger Stone has always been nuts. But should he be going to jail?

Last night, Brian Williams asked Frank Figliuzzi a version of that question. If the transcript ever shows up, it will show up here.

Figliuzzi has been one of the best of the many former prosecutors and law enforcement officials seen on cable in recent years. We were struck by several aspects of his answer to Williams:

FIGLIUZZI (7/10/20): Lest anyone feel any sympathy for this man, let's just spend a minute recalling what he was convicted of, and why the president had to commute his sentence.

Roger Stone tried to subvert, undermine our presidential election system. And he did so in concert with two foreign entities, namely, there's evidence indicating that he was the intermediary between the Russian intelligence unit known as Guccifer and the Wikileaks organization.

And I'll point to federal court testimony by Rick Gates, the former deputy chairman of the Trump 2016 campaign, who said in court, I was riding in a Chevy Suburban with Trump to LaGuardia Airport. Trump took a call from Roger Stone. They appeared to talk about Wikileaks and the release of the hacked material from the DNC.

When Trump ended the call, he turned to Gates and said, They're going to release more information.

This is why Trump had to commute Roger Stone. Roger Stone can put Donald Trump in federal prison for lying. Lying when? Lying in his written responses to the special counsel when the president told Robert Mueller, I never heard about Roger Stone talking to anybody about the timing or the release of the hacked DNC/Clinton material.

First, a point of clarification:

We assume Figliuzzi meant that Stone was the intermediary between Guccifer and the Trump campaign, and also between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign. We assume he didn't mean that Stone was the intermediary between Guccifer and Wikileaks.

Now to the basic assertions by Figliuzzi, an extremely respectable figure:

We'll admit that we were initially struck by the word "appeared." It appeared to Gates, a less than fully reliable figure who was looking for a break from prosecutors, that Trump had spoken to Stone about the release of the hacked material?

A jury, of course, convicted Stone on seven counts on the basis of the evidence it was offered at trial. That said, we were struck by the idea that this was the strongest evidence showing that Stone should be going to prison.

Beyond that, we were struck by the claim that Stone had subverted the election system—even that he'd been convicted for doing that.

For the record, Stone wasn't convicted of subverting or undermining our election system. He was convicted on six counts of testifying falsely and on one count of witness tampering.

Would Stone have been "subverting our system" if he merely told Trump that more emails were going to be released?

That strikes us as a vast overstatement, especially coming from within the mainstream press corps, which pleasured itself so dumbly and so irresponsibly by mugging and clowning with the stolen emails while pretending that they were significant. They can play reindeer games with the emails. Stone can't even mention them!

Could Stone send Donald J. Trump to prison? Before Trump's massive derangement helped mire this nation in the ongoing pandemic, two of our cable news channels ran on such fever dreams for the bulk of two years.

Figliuzzi has been one of the most respectable, and most intelligent, of these many dreamers. For ourselves, we favor seeing fewer people in prison, and we favor something else, although it will never occur:

We favor people like Williams reporting the various ways his ridiculous guild slandered Candidate Clinton for decades, eventually sending Candidate Trump to the White House.

That dream will never be realized, of course. But it isn't a fever dream.

Cable pundits were very upset about the commutation. William Barr even got in the act. On Thursday, he said the prosecution was righteous and the sentence was fair.

We're not even saying that's wrong. Stone has been crazy for years.

At any rate, everyone was upset by the commutation. That said, before the commutation was announced, the gang was having some good solid fun with Trump's recent ridiculous statement about the unbelievable way he aced the cognitive test.

On Deadline White House, Wallace and Heilemann even seemed to pretend that this was some sort of new revelation. It fell to the Post's Ashley Parker to remind them that this ridiculous episode was reported and discussed long ago.

As you can see through the link below, the pundits were having some fun with that. In his new column in the Washington Post, Colbert King reminds us of a topic they weren't talking about.

He reminds us of a topic they won't be talking about. Her reminds us of a topic they don't seem to care about.

Liberal cable doesn't seem to care a great deal about kids like Davon McNeal, Makiyah Wilson and Karon Brown, or about the various systems which haven't been able to protect them. Such kids don't get discussed on our favorite TV shows.

They do get discussed in Colbert King's columns, and it happens again today. Along the way, King even sends a poison pen letter to his own upper-end guild:

KING (7/11/20): We ended 2019 with a decade-high number of homicides [in Washington, D.C.]. With 94 people killed in the city thus far this year, we are on pace to top last year’s 166 killings.

Yes, the novel coronavirus is crippling the country. Yes, there are Black Lives Matter protests. And, yes, there are those “race and reckoning” stories being churned out nonstop by a guilt-stricken, algorithm-driven media.

But there are people in this city shattered by crime who don’t make the front page or lead the nightly news. Hundreds of children who are trying to cope with the trauma and pain of growing up in violence-filled neighborhoods. Girls and boys who put on brave faces but are scared to death of going to and from school or out to play where crime has taken hold and won’t go away.

Oof. According to King, the upper-end press corps is "churning out nonstop stories" about "race and reckoning."

They're doing so, this ranking guild member says, because they're guilt-stricken, but also because they're algorithm-driven.

That seems to mean that they're doing so in something resembling bad faith. We've had the same impression ourselves. We've suggested that possibility here.

Yesterday, Nicolle and John wanted to laugh and play and talk about Trump's latest ridiculous statement—his ridiculous statement about the cognitive test he aced. Yesterday afternoon, they were having some good fun with that.

(Click here, move ahead to the 7:40 mark.)

They weren't discussing the lives and the interests of the children King names in his column. As for King's newspaper, it publishes "algorithm driven" material of this type, letting readers think that the Post is discussing the educational interests of black and Hispanic kids.

(That wasn't the reporter's fault; she's in her first year out of college. Does the Post have any experienced reporters who deal with subjects like this?)

Watching cable in recent years. we've learned at least one thing. Former federal prosecutors love to discuss the endless ways they can get people locked up.

Also, people like Wallace and Heilemann like to laugh and play. They just don't seem to spend much time on kids like Davon McNeal.

People do hear about those kids on the Fox News Channel. Such reports may be accompanied by crazy assessments—much more so from Tucker Carlson than from Laura Ingraham.

But viewers do hear about those kids. On our channels, the algorithms don't seem to take us there.

We'd like to hear more about those kids—about their safety. about their schooling, about the systems which aren't protecting them. We'd like to hear how good they are—but on cable, those kids don't count.

We've been telling you this for years. No, it's not going to change.

Deaths still rising, Trump still nuts!

FRIDAY, JULY 10, 2020

Thoroughly baffled by Krugman: We're thoroughly baffled by the basic framework of Paul Krugman's new column.

First, though, an apparent mistake. In passing, Krugman says this about the pandemic:

"National death totals are still declining..."

We're afraid that's no longer true. As of this morning, the nationwide 7-day average has bumped up again.

As of this morning, we're averaging 576.7 deaths per day nationwide (July 3-July 9). We'd already dropped below that point as of June 23 (571.9, June 16-June 22).

The number continued to drop after that, inching down below 540. But now it seems to be moving back up again.

It seems clear that the decline has stopped. All that's left may be the size of what now seems to be the rise.

That's a minor if horrible point. We're baffled by Krugman's overall framework. Our bafflement starts with Krugman's headline, then continues with some points after that:
KRUGMAN (7/10/20): The Deadly Delusions of Mad King Donald

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling more and more as if we’re all trapped on the Titanic—except that this time around the captain is a madman who insists on steering straight for the iceberg. And his crew is too cowardly to contradict him, let alone mutiny to save the passengers.
As he opens, Krugman refers to Trump as a madman. Also, as a "mad" king driven by "delusions."

Later, he refers to Trump's "pathologically inept response to the coronavirus." He refers to his "delusions" again, and once again calls him "mad."

That said:

Even as this psychological/psychiatric language floats around, Krugman never brooks the possibility that Trump really is delusional, mad or pathological, and not just in the metaphorical sense.

Trump's niece, Mary Trump, is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book in which she discusses Trump and his "high-functioning sociopath" father in psychiatric terms. But even with this new prompting, our journalists refuse to consider the possibility that the president is psychiatrically or psychologically ill in some literal sense.

It may be that this is a stricture imposed on columnists from above. But at some point, the refusal to brook an obvious possibility becomes almost as odd as Trump's relentless lunacy itself.

Is Donald J. Trump psychiatrically ill? The steadfast refusal to conduct that discussion is part of the era's madness.

Deaths are rising again, thanks to Trump. How did we get to this place?

ANATOMY OF MODERN DISCUSSION: Fort Apache the Bronx, back in '71!

FRIDAY, JULY 10, 2020

Whose deaths turn up on TV?: Over the weekend, the claim flitted by, two or three separate times, as we flipped through C-Span's programs.

It sounded like it couldn't be true. In the end, we decided to check.

The claim had been made by Rafael Mangual, Deputy Director for Policy Research/Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. As part of a much longer presentation, this was his factual claim, though it seemed a bit hard to believe:

MANGUAL (6/18/20): In 1971, the NYPD fired their weapons more than 800 times. They wounded more than 220 people and killed almost a hundred. By 2016, those numbers were down to 72, twenty-something and nine, respectively.

To watch the whole C-Span program, click here.

Meanwhile, say what? In 1971, police officers in New York City shot and killed "almost a hundred" people?

The statement seemed hard to believe. We ourselves were in and out of Gotham in those days. Our sister and her husband were living in Manhattan at the time, on their way to a stay in Bed-Stuy.

In 1974, we even stood backstage at the Winter Garden as we watched Zero Mostel perform Ulysses in Nighttown! If memory serves, it was one of Mostel's greatest thrills!

We'd been in and out of New York in those days. We didn't recall all that gunfire, or any blowback from same.

In fairness, this had been the general era of Fort Apache, The Bronx. It was also the decade of Manhattan, a film in which no one got shot by police, not even the Woody Allen character, who we now understand to have been richly deserving.

That said, did Gotham police shoot and kill almost one hundred people in 1971? Skillfully, we started to google. Soon, we were reading this report from WNYC, the Gotham NPR outlet:

HENNELLY (11/22/11): The number of civilians shot and killed by New York City police officers has fallen to a record low.

In its annual firearm discharge report, the NYPD said officers killed eight people in 2010—compared to 12 in 2009 and 93 in 1971, when the record keeping began.

The NYPD shot and wounded 16 civilians last year.

[...]

The dramatic reduction in civilian police shooting casualties parallels an equally significant decline in NYPD officers fatally shot in the line of duty. In 1971 a dozen officers were killed, whereas for the last three years no officers were. Also in 1971, 47 officers were wounded, compared to only two last year.

As it turned out, Mangual's numbers were solid! In 2015, PolitiFact reported that 1971 had been "a particularly brutal year for both shootings of cops (47 injured, 12 killed) as well as the number of people shot and killed by police (221 injured, 93 people killed)."

The official data are here. As always, we certainly can, and we surely will, believe whatever we want.

So it went in the street-fighting days of 1971. One year earlier, as chaos reigned, the Weatherman accidentally detonated one of their home-made bombs, blowing up their Greenwich Village townhouse. So it went in those long-ago years.

Today, things are perhaps perceived to be worse. Consider:

Yesterday, the New York Times published the type of first-person account it just can't seem to quit. Thanks to the highlighted claims at the start of the profile, the ridiculous paper had finally found a Republican hopeful to love:

PETERS AND GRAY (7/9/20): John James still feels the sting from the harrowing encounters and indignities he has experienced as a young Black man crossing paths with the police.

He recently recalled the time he was with the woman who is now his wife at an upscale mall in suburban Detroit and two officers approached them in their car, guns drawn. Had his wife, who is white, not been there to de-escalate the situation, he said, “I don’t know what would have happened.”

A few years later, he was pulled over with one of their sons in the back seat. At the sight of the flashing blue and red lights, he asked himself if this was the day his child “sees his daddy bleed out in the street.” Mr. James, a West Point graduate and Apache helicopter pilot who once flew combat missions in Iraq, came to a chilling conclusion: He could be killed during a traffic stop in the suburbs just as easily as he could have been killed at war.

These are the kinds of stories that Mr. James, a Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan, said he hoped would help white Americans better understand the issues of racial justice now at the forefront of an election unlike any in his lifetime.

Will those stories help white Americans better understand (important) issues of racial justice? Even as we agree to assume that those stories are true, we have no way of answering that question.

We do note this:

The Times didn't attempt to explain why James was pulled over in his car on that one occasion. (Through some remarkable fluke, the future candidate didn't bleed out in the street in front of his son that night.)

Also, why had officers approached his car in suburban Detroit that time, guns drawn? The Times didn't go into that either. As readers, we were allowed to flesh out these stories through the work product of our own minds.

For the record, Candidate James sounds like an impressive person. It sounds like he's lived an impressive life.

(Even more so, his impressive father. At present, James runs "a shipping business that is part of the company his father started after moving to Michigan from segregated Mississippi in the 1960s." We're always amazed by people who have what it takes to do things like that.)

Candidate James is an impressive person. In 2018, he came surprisingly close to winning his previous Senate race.

That said, was his assessment correct?

Granted, it's the type of assessment the New York Times currently seems to love. But is it correct to say that Candidate James "could be killed during a traffic stop in the suburbs just as easily as he could have been killed at war?"

We're prepared to suggest that that assessment may not make perfect sense, even though it's a type of assessment the New York Times currently loves to publish.

In fairness, such assessments are thrilling to read of a weekend out in the Hamptons, and they fuel revolutionary fervor. On the downside, people may start believing such assessments, even passing them on to their kids.

Before long, substantial people may write essays for Slate in which they say their 7-year-old son was "terrified" by the things they recently told him. More specifically, they may say their 7-year-old son is terrified by what he's been told and wants to leave the United States.

Out in the Hamptons, that's a good read! But in the mind of a 7-year-old child, that is a tale of true terror—and, perhaps, an unfortunate tale of a possible misapprehension.

Could Candidate James "be killed during a traffic stop in the suburbs just as easily as he could have been killed at war?"

We're prepared to suggest a possibility which won't likely show up in the Times. We're prepare to suggest the possibility that that's a misguided assessment.

To explain why we're prepared to do that, we'll now mention a second person we've seen on TV in the past few weeks. We refer to Wilfred Reilly, an assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, an historically black college in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Reilly is the kind of person you're allowed to see on the Fox News Channel but not on CNN or MSNBC. We've seen him briefly on two Fox programs in something like the past month.

As Fox guests go, we'd say that Reilly is strongly non-partisan. On the other hand, he's sometimes a bit less precise with his statistical summaries than we'd like cable guests to be.

That said, his current data address an interesting question. Whose deaths will you see on cable TV, or in the New York Times?

More specifically, whose shooting deaths at the hands of police will you hear about on TV or read about in the Times? In a brief recent appearance with Laura Ingraham, the gentleman said this:

REILLY (7/6/20): In my most recent book, Taboo, I look at a lot of these cultural questions in American society. And I mean, one of the things I find, that other researchers have found many times before, is that the large, 75-80 percent majority of those killed by police in a typical year, for example, are Caucasian or Hispanic individuals, and those cases receive less than 20 percent of the media coverage of police violence.

To watch that brief appearance, click here, move ahead to 23:30.

There are other ways to sift those numbers about who gets shot and killed. We don't know where the statistic about media coverage comes from. For our money, Reilly isn't always a total stickler for perfect statistical accuracy.

That said, Reilly is speaking to a blindingly obvious state of affairs—a state of affairs you'll only hear discussed on Fox. In Taboo: Ten Facts You Can't Talk About, he discusses this same topic—the disparate coverage, within major media, of black and white shooting deaths.

When black shooting deaths are extensively covered and white shooting deaths may not be covered at all, misperceptions may arise. We think of the absurd presentation John Yang recently slept through on the PBS NewsHour:

YANG (6/16/20): Louisville has banned—in reaction to this, banned no-knock warrants. They called it Breonna's Law. How effective do you think that will be?

RITCHIE: I think it's good that we're stepping back to look at how those police officers came to be at her door and looking to interrupt one of the mechanisms that has resulted in her death and also in the death of—I can name five other black women killed by no-knock warrants, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, Alberta Spruill, Aiyana Stanley-Jones.

So, there's many—this is not the first time. And so I think that stopping no-knock warrants is important, and that we need to recognize that increasing the time that folks have to respond to 15 or 30 seconds or a minute, imagine someone backing on your door in the middle of the night. That's not enough time to understand what's going on either.

So, we need to maybe step further back and ask ourselves, why are people showing up at—police officers, armed police officers, showing up on people's doors to serve no-knock or short-knock warrants?

And I think then we need to look at the war on drugs, which is where those warrants came from and what brought those officers to Breonna's door that night. And we need to rethink our approach to that in a way that we are taking an approach to saving lives not, taking them, in this way, as Breonna Taylor's was taken.

Barnard researcher Andrea Ritchie was Yang's only guest. When she named people other than the late Breonna Taylor who had died during "no-knock" raids, she named five black women, and she named nobody else.

Almost surely, such presentations will create false impressions. Yang and Judy Woodruff should have been disciplined, the very next day, for sleepwalking though that presentation on PBS that night.

Especially with respect to life-and-death matters, selective presentation may lead to gross misimpressions. Before too long, we have Hopkins professors who won't leave their homes, and we have terrified 7-year-olds who want to leave the country.

You can hear about this topic on Fox. CNN's angriest dog in the world is unlikely to speak to this issue.

Here within our failing society, this is the way our upper-end "discussions" now work. On the upper levels of the press, we've been this dumb, and this destructive, for an extremely long time.

We were surprised by what we learned from the Manhattan Institute researcher. We weren't surprised by what Reilly said, but we think he's discussing a topic which ought to be discussed a lot more.

That said, the things that people are told on Fox aren't heard by us Over Here. On our own cable channels, we're handed our own tribal tales, nothing else.

On the upper ends of our corporate press corps, this is largely the way "discussion" had worked for decades before Donald J. Trump ever descended that staircase.

By light-years, Trump is the most disordered high-level player yet. But these people, all through the upper-end press corps, were thoroughly Trumpist before he arrived on the scene.

How many people are shot and killed by police officers? Roughly a thousand people per year!

Which deaths get covered, which get disappeared? We've seen Reilly address that question twice, but it's all taking place Over There. This is no way for discussion to work, but it's how we got Trump in the first place.

Friedman sets rules for Trump-Biden debates!

THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2020

Least savvy thought of all time: Can anybody really imagine a set of Trump-Biden debates?

Theoretically, they're going to happen. But can anyone really picture such monsters from the deep?

In yesterday's New York Times, Thomas Friedman offered some suggestions for the way these debates should work. At one point, he gave voice to the least savvy thought of all time:

FRIEDMAN (7/8/20): Biden should insist that a real-time fact-checking team approved by both candidates be hired by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates—and that 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled.

Does Friedman actually live on this planet? No really—where does this guy live?

It's very, very hard to believe that any pair of candidates will ever agree to stop their debate with ten minutes to go so a fact-check team can identify their various misstatements.

It's very hard to imagine that. But no, that isn't our point.

What brought us out of our chairs was Friedman's reference to "outright lies." Is he really suggesting that our fact-checking team should identify such deliberate misstatements at the end of each debate?

That strikes us as a sad presentation. This is Elementary Logic 101, but how exactly would they know when an "outright lie" had occurred?

We're dealing here with a point so simple that everyone used to know it. It's relatively easy to spot a misstatement, but it's very hard to reliably identify a "lie."

Not long ago, every journalist understood this blindingly basic point. It was considered extremely bad journalistic form to refer to a misstatement as a lie.

Reason? A lie is a deliberate misstatement—and it's hard to get inside someone else's head.

In our view, Trump's mental disorder only drives this basic point home. We know of reason to think that Trump cares about telling the truth or making accurate statements.

But in any given case, can anyone feel they know what's going on inside that disordered noggin? How many of his lunatic statements might he believe to be true?

Maybe Friedman didn't mean that the fact-check team would explicitly identify "outright lies." But what a lack of sophistication was tangled up in that statement!

Journalistically speaking, of course, it's much like Springsteen said. Journalistically, this is our hometown, and its storefronts are badly faded.

It looks like deaths (may) have started to rise!

THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2020

American carnage in action: Just in time for deaths to appear to begin moving up, The Atlantic has offered five perfectly decent reasons explaining why deaths keep going down while "cases" keep going up.

After a long decline from a very high point, have deaths begun increasing again? A 3-day holiday weekend can create a significant statistical glitch, but this is where the numbers have stood on each of the past seven Thursday mornings:

Daily deaths nationwide from covid-19
7-day rolling average
May 28: 971.9
June 4: 908.6
June 11: 773.4
June 18: 650.0
June 25: 574.7
July 2: 537.9
July 9: 551.6

A long decline began in mid-April, when the 7-day rolling average exceeded 2000 deaths per day. To appearances, that long decline has leveled off, and may now have started to rise.

Why have deaths been in decline in recent weeks even as "cases" have been rising? The Atlantic offers five perfectly sensible reasons. The essay is well worth reading:

1. Deaths lag cases
2. Expanded testing is finding more cases, milder cases, and earlier cases
3. The typical COVID-19 patient is getting younger
4. Hospitalized patients are dying less frequently, even without a home-run treatment
5. Summer might be helping—but probably only a little bit

We'll guess that there could be other perfectly sensible reasons. (Improved policies regarding nursing homes?)

That said, the oddness of "cases" as a statistic makes this phenomenon a natural puzzler. Remember:

The number of "cases" you see reported each night is only the number of cases which have been confirmed/diagnosed by a coronavirus test. There may be many other new infections (new cases) which haven't been so diagnosed.

Just two nights ago, on MSNBC, Dr. Redlener said the actual number of new cases may be ten times as high as the number you see reported on a daily basis. It's just that all those other new infections haven't been confirmed by a test. Infected parties may have no idea that they're even infected.

In short, no one knows how many actual new cases there actually are at any given time. That makes it hard to compare the number of "cases" with the number of deaths.

In many other countries (not all), deaths have largely been snuffed out. In Donald J. Trump's America, deaths may be back on the rise.

You'll continue to hear every kind of statistical misstatement from the stars of cable news, even at times from experts. But we're involved in a rolling disaster-by-dumbness—a dumbness which started long ago, in large part within the tents of our mainstream press elite.

They pimped The Donald every step of the way, going all the way back to Marla Maples' report of the "best sex ever." To balance things off, they kept calling Hillary Clinton Evita and Nurse Ratched, while tolerating crackpot discussions of the many people she'd killed.

All the idiots gamboled and played, having their fun with these dimwitted themes. In November 2016, the laughter largely faded.

At that point, we geniuses over here on the left decided to start our resistance. We leaped into action, ready for battle, at least thirty years too late!

ANATOMY OF MODERN DISCUSSION: Novelization of news in the raw!

THURSDAY, JULY 9, 2020

The Post reports on George Floyd: For better or worse, you'll never see it any more clearly.

You'll never see the architecture of modern journalistic "discussion" laid out in a more explicit fashion.

In part, we refer to the practice we began describing, in the last century, as "the novelization of news." More specifically, we refer to a practice which might have been drawn directly from Wonderland:

Storyline first! the prevailing rule says. Information later.

It may not be narrative all the way down, but plainly it's "Narrative First."

We refer to the lengthy front-page news report in this morning's Washington Post, a front-page report which includes a wealth of new detail about the dreadful killing of the late George Floyd.

Readers are handed the storyline first. Right there in paragraph 2, still on the paper's front page, readers are told what they should think about everything which will follow:

EXPERIENCED REPORTER (7/9/20): George Floyd repeatedly begged police officers not to shoot him and complained of being claustrophobic as they tried to place him in a squad car in the minutes before he was killed on a South Minneapolis street corner in May, according to transcripts of police body camera footage from the scene released Wednesday.

The transcripts make clear that Floyd was trying to cooperate with police but was deathly afraid of them, at times telling them that he had had covid-19 and was worried that he was going to die because he couldn’t breathe while in their custody...

"The transcripts make clear that Floyd was trying to cooperate with police." Readers are handed this storyline at the start of this morning's report.

Readers are told that this is what they should think about the information which will follow. You'll rarely see a purer instance of modern press storyline.

Before we continue, let's make two basic points:

First, what follows is not intended as a criticism of George Floyd. It's not intended as a commentary on any of his behavior.

To the extent that what follows is commentary on anyone, it's intended as commentary on the behavior of the Washington Post. For ourselves, if we believed there were angels in heaven, we'd believe that one of them would surely be George Floyd.

Our second point would be this:

What follows is principally meant as a contribution to the science of anthropology. It's intended as a report on one of the ways our highly tribal, war-inclined species is strongly inclined to behave.

The major experts with whom we consult say this behavior was bred in the bone. However we may regard that claim, you'll rarely see a clearer example of the inclination to novelize all information—of the inclination to adhere to preferred tribal storyline even in the face of countervailing facts.

That said, let's try to remember! What follows isn't meant, in any way, as a commentary on Floyd. It's offered as a report on human instinct, especially during heavily fraught, tribalized times such as these.

At deeply fraught times, or so we've been told, we humans were especially inclined to cling to tribal narrative. So it was, we'd have to say, at the start of the Post's news report.

The transcripts make clear that Floyd was trying to cooperate with police? That's what Post readers are instantly told today. Concerning that statement, please note:

The transcripts don't suggest that Floyd was trying to cooperate. The transcripts don't help us gauge the extent to which Floyd actually did cooperate.

According to the opening statement, the transcripts make it clear that he was trying to do so. We're told that this is what we should think, a bit later on, when we read such excerpts as this:

EXPERIENCED REPORTER: Officers had responded to a 911 call from Cup Foods complaining of a customer who had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Kueng and Lane were the first officers on the scene, and the transcripts show that a store clerk pointed them to where Floyd and two others sat in a parked car nearby.

Transcripts show that Lane approached the car and called on Floyd at least five times to show his hands, drawing his gun when he didn’t. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Floyd responded, according to a transcript of Lane’s body camera. “I didn’t do nothing. . . . What did I do though? What did we do, Mr. Officer?”

In that passage, it almost sounds like former officer Lane asked Floyd to show his hands five times without Floyd doing so.

Was cooperation already missing? A few paragraphs later, the reporter tells us this:

EXPERIENCED REPORTER: The transcripts show that Floyd continued to ask officers not to shoot him as he stepped from his vehicle, and suggest that he struggled with officers as they tried to handcuff him.

As we've noted, this isn't meant as a criticism of Floyd, or of his behavior. Concerning the Post's journalistic behavior, does that passage help "make it clear" that Floyd was trying to cooperate with the two officers then on the scene?

Does that passage seem to comport with the Post reporter's instant front-page storyline? For ourselves, we'd say it does not. Ditto for what comes next:

EXPERIENCED REPORTER (continuing directly): “Stop resisting Floyd!” Shawanda Renee Hill, a witness inside the car, called out, according to the transcript of the footage from Lane’s camera.

Nothing about these events is funny, but it's hard not to laugh at the reporter's description of Hill as "a witness inside the car," as if Floyd had been driving an Uber that day and Hill had just been picked up.

In fact, Hill seems to have been a friend or acquaintance of Floyd. At this point, the transcript suggests that she thought her friend was resisting arrest.

As the Post reporter continues, Hill's view is further fleshed out:

EXPERIENCED REPORTER (continuing directly): As Kueng walked Floyd across the street, Lane asked Hill about Floyd’s behavior. “Why’s he getting all squirrelly and not showing us his hands and just being all weird like that?” he asked, according to the transcript.

“I have no clue, because he’s been shot before,” Hill said.

Lane asked whether Floyd was “drunk” or “on something.”

“No, he got a thing going on, I’m telling you, about the police,” Hill replied. “He have problems all the time when they come, especially when that man put that gun like that.”

It isn't clear what Hill is talking about by the end of that passage. But when Lane suggests that Floyd's behavior seems somewhat odd, Hill doesn't seem to disagree.

Later, we're told this:

EXPERIENCED REPORTER: According to the transcripts, the officers tried placing Floyd in the squad car, but he resisted, repeatedly telling them he was “claustrophobic” and had “anxiety.” He begged to be released from his handcuffs, promising he wouldn’t hurt anyone. “Y’all, I’m going to die in here,” he told them. “I just had COVID man, don’t want to go back to that.”

By then, Chauvin and Thao had arrived as Kueng and Lane were struggling to get Floyd in the car...[A]t one point, an unknown officer sought to intervene, according to the transcripts. “Man, you’re going to die of a heart attack,” one of the officers told Floyd. “Just get in the car.”

First, Hill explicitly seemed to say that Floyd "resisted." Now, though, the reporter does! She says it in her own words!

Meanwhile, the two rookie officers were "struggling to get Floyd" into their police car. This is what the reporter says we can glean from the transcripts!

By now, former officer Derek Chauvin has arrived on the scene. When he does, the events of the day take a disastrous turn.

For the record, the Post reporter describes several instances in which Lane, the rookie cop, tries to get the experienced veteran to stop killing Floyd. In their own front-page report in this morning's New York Times, Oppel and Barker provide more detail about these several attempts.

So it went in this morning's Washington Post. If you watched Lawrence O'Donnell last night, you saw a remarkably selective reading of these tragic transcripts.

Needless to say, Hill's statement that Floyd was "resisting" wasn't mentioned by Lawrence at all. Lawrence included only one fleeting reference to Lane's suggestions to his superior officer that he should stop killing Floyd.

"So it tended to go among this highly tribal species," our highly credentialed advisers have said. They speak in the past tense at such times, as pitiful wailing emerges from the caves in which they now seem to live.

With respect to this morning'a report in the Post, these experts have told us this:

Rarely will you see the essence of journalistic "discussion" so clearly carved into stone:

Readers are told what they should believe right at the start of the lengthy report. Readers are handed the storyline first. A torrent of contradictory information comes later!

As some may struggle to recall, none of this is meant as a criticism of the late George Floyd.

(Experts say that humans generally longed to hear their tribal storylines, and tended to have a very hard time focusing on anything else.)

This isn't even meant, in the main, as a criticism of the Washington Post.

It's true that, in Sunday's editions, the Post published a lengthy report by an inexperienced rookie reporter. The rookie had been sent out to pretend that the paper cares about the lives and interests of black kids.

Mainly, though, it seems that she'd been told to stick to approved storyline. Or some editor may have stepped in.

Our sources tell us that this was done because the Post's more experienced reporters have been told to focus on offensive costumes worn by well-intentioned people at Halloween parties past. They've been asked to compile lists of well-intentioned people the Post may be able to get fired from their jobs for Thought Crimes of this type.

This left it to a rookie reporter, one year out of college, to report on a (prestigious) public school and on the lives and the interests of black kids.

That reporter graduated from Harvard last June (class of 2019). Before that, she prepped at Georgetown Day. Not that there's anything wrong with it because, of course, there isn't.

There is something wrong with letting an inexperienced non-specialist report on the interests of black kids. That said, our journalistic elites have always played it that way, and they always will.

There's little sign that the cub reporter knows much about the problems of public schools and low-income schooling. That said, she knew the prevailing storyline—and in this world, it's "Storyline First."

This isn't the kid reporter's fault. We shouldn't even "blame" her editors, our future experts insist.

These experts say that all these players should be listed among Styron's "beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth."

In Sophie's Choice, Sophie Zawistowski was one such person, but so were many others. That's the most humane way to view these events, these weeping top experts have said.

Tomorrow: "Discussions" of police shootings

How useful is "cases" as a statistic?

WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 2020

Consider what Redlener said: How strange a statistic is "cases?" Consider what Dr. Irwin Redlener said to Brian Williams last night.

(We can't give you a link. As we type on Wednesday afternoon, the slacker channel has produced transcripts only through last Thursday's night's TV shows.)

Redlener strikes us as one of the best of the many capable medical specialists currently being glimpsed on cable TV. Here's part of what he said in reply to Donald Trump's recent crazy claims concerning our triumph over the virus:

REDLENER (7/7/20): Anthony Fauci said, just two weeks ago, that we can expect to see 100,000 new, confirmed, tested cases every day, which means that's about a tenth of what the real number is because not everybody gets tested. So we could be seeing a million new cases a day within the next few weeks.

Redlener joined Dr. Fauci's recent prediction—100,000 new confirmed cases per day—with Dr. Redfield's earlier statement that the actual number of cases to date may be as much as ten times the current recorded amount.

On that basis, Redlener says we may soon be experiencing one million new infections per day, with 100,000 of those new infections/new cases being confirmed through testing.

Will that actually happen? Will a million additional people be getting infected each day?

We have no idea. But again, just consider how strange a statistic "cases" is! Think of it like this:

Why do we use this statistic at all if the number we're recording and reporting may be off by as much as a factor of ten? Can we make valid comparisons over time if we're missing this many actual cases? Can we make valid comparisons from one state to another? From one part of some state to another part of that state?

If the number of cases we record depends so heavily on 1) the volume of testing being conducted, and 2) the public's interest in being tested, then what are we really recording and reporting?

Deaths are easy, "cases" are hard! If the number we're recording each day may be off by a factor of ten, how valuable is "cases" as a statistic?

We don't know the answer to that question. Also, no one is going to ask!

(Redlener shared time with two non-medical guests as Brian hopscotched around. This is the way "discussion" works in our current version of Short Attention Span Theater.)

Chris Hayes makes a strange pair of corrections!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 2020

Does anyone here know anything other than storyline?: No one can sensibly blame Chris Hayes for what Michael Williams said.

Williams is president of the Memphis Police Association. Last Tuesday night, he appeared on All In during a special town hall program about urban policing.

Four big-city mayors appeared as Hayes' guests. Midway through, Williams was interviewed. As we noted yesterday, he made this wildly inaccurate presentation about fatal police shootings:

WILLIAMS (6/30/20): Police answered over 10 million calls last year. Out of those 10 million calls, I think you–the FBI said you had about 1,000-and-some individuals that were shot.

Out of that 1,000 individuals, you had 400 that were armed–or unarmed. I believe you had 19 Caucasians that were shot and killed by the police last year. You only had nine African-Americans that were killed by the police last year.

Now, don't get me wrong. Anybody that's killed needlessly, that's wrong and it needs to be addressed. But at the same time, I think that we're definitely putting a lot of emphasis on the police when we have, in this city, 222 individuals were murdered in this city last year.

HAYES: Memphis Police Association president Michael Williams, in the city of Memphis. Thank you so much, sir. I appreciate it.

WILLIAMS: Thank you.

That presentation was wildly inaccurate, but it went uncorrected that night. The basic problems are these:

Number of people shot: Williams seemed to say that "about one thousand" people were shot by police officers last year. In fact, that's the approximate number of people who were shot and killed by police.

Number who were unarmed: Williams seemed to say that about four hundred of those thousand people were unarmed. (Despite his initial stumble, it was fairly clear that that was what he meant.)

It's harder to settle this factual matter. The Washington Post's Fatal Force site says that, of the 999 people shot and killed by police last year, only 55 were unarmed.

The Post reaches that judgment because it counts Tasers, baseball bats, knives, shovels, crowbars and cars as weapons. The Post says that 599 of the 999 people shot and killed were actually "armed" with a gun, and that 55 of the 999 had no weapon at all.

Black and white people shot: Williams seemed to say that police shot and killed only 19 white people and nine black people last year. That claim would be crazily wrong.

Williams seems to have gotten those numbers, and other numbers, from the Fatal Force site. Until about a month ago, the Fatal Force site listed those as the numbers of unarmed white and black people shot and killed by police last year. For some reason, the numbers then changed to 25 white people and 15 black people. Today, the site lists the numbers as 25 and 14.

People, can we talk? We know these things because we've puzzled over these numbers at substantial length.

This is a very high-profile topic. We sometimes wonder if any "journalists" ever consult any such data at all, as opposed to treating the topic as storyline all the way down.

We're familiar with the data from the Post site. Listening to Hayes on Wednesday night, we wondered if he has ever spent any time perusing any such data at all.

Williams made his wildly inaccurate presentation on Tuesday, June 30. Hayes said nothing at the time, but he offered a somewhat puzzling correction of Williams the following night.

He also offered a peculiar correction of his own peculiar misstatement about coronavirus testing, a groaner from last Monday's program.

Does anyone here play this game at all? Last Wednesday night, Hayes started his two-part correction like this:

HAYES (7/1/20): Last night, we held a special town hall on cities, police and the movement for black lives.

One of our guests was the president of the Memphis Police Union, Michael Williams, who at one point began rattling off some statistics about police shootings in America I had not heard before.

Some statistics he hadn't heard before?

In fact, Williams had rattled off some statistics which were crazily wrong. Anyone with any knowledge of this topic would have instantly known that.

At this point, Hayes made a journalistically strange decision; he played the videotape of Williams' misstatements all over again. Then, as he continued along, he made his own strange remarks:

HAYES: In the moment, those numbers struck me as implausibly low. But these data can be hard to find, so we tried to get Michael Williams to help us out, we tried to track him down.

We could not find them, which might not be surprising since the FBI database on police use of force, launched last year, which I think is what he was citing. has not yet publicly released any information.

The numbers "struck him as implausibly low?" Does that mean he didn't know that they were crazily wrong?

Meanwhile, data about police shootings aren't "hard to find" at all! As Hayes continued, he seemed to reverse this peculiar claim, then provided some actual data:

HAYES (continuing directly): In fact, various media organizations, because the reporting's so bad on this, have had to build their own systems from scratch in light of the lacking public data.

Now one of the best of those databases, which is from the Washington Post, found that police shot and killed 14 unarmed black people last year and 25 unarmed white people.

Those are the numbers which now appear at the Fatal Force site. According to that site, police shot and killed 25 unarmed white people and 14 unarmed black people last year.

From there, Hayes noted that some people die in encounters with police officers without being shot. Eventually, Hayes said this:

HAYES: The Washington Post database shows about one thousand people a year being shot and killed by the police, for example, a disproportionate number being black and Hispanic.

Hayes didn't give the actual numbers. He merely said the numbers were "disproportionate."

You can't sensibly blame Chris Hayes because a guest on his program made a jumbled presentation which included some wildly inaccurate claims. You would assume that a major corporate-paid journalist would have known that the presentation was crazily wrong in real time.

That's especially true of a figure like Hayes, who was plainly intelligent and sophisticated coming in. Since then, it seems to us that he has increasingly become a captive of storyline.

At any rate, Hayes' statement on Wednesday night struck us as highly peculiar. It's hard to believe that he didn't know how far off-base Williams' claims had been. But he managed to put that thought in our heads with the things he said Wednesday night.

Last Monday night, Hayes had made his own peculiar misstatement about coronavirus testing in Oklahoma (for transcript, see yesterday's post). In this case, a statement made by Hayes himself made no apparent sense.

How could anyone seriously think that everyone tested in Oklahoma had tested positive for two consecutive days? It's like thinking a cow had jumped over the moon. But that's what Hayes had said.

After correcting what Williams had said, Hayes offered a correction for that strange howler too. For better or worse, we can't show you what he said because of the latest slacker conduct from his slacker "news channel."

All last week and all through this weekend, MSNBC left its programs untranscribed from last Tuesday on. Over the weekend, in an excess of caution, we ourselves transcribed what Hayes had said last Wednesday night about Williams. We planned to use the transcript they would eventually prepare for his self-correction.

As of yesterday, the slacker channel had finally posted some transcripts. Last Tuesday's transcript had always been there. Now, last Thursday's transcript was posted as well, but the slacker channel had skipped right over last Wednesday!

(Tape of the show is no longer available.)

This is the way these lazy, incompetent corporate lapdogs function. They've been this way for the past thirty years. Nothing is going to change this.

As Springsteen said, Take a good look around. This is your hometown.

Did Chris Hayes know that Williams' presentation was crazily wrong? And hpow on earth had he managed to claim that everyone tested in Oklahoma came up positive for two consecutive days?

Putting it a different way, does anyone on "cable news" know anything other than storyline? Is it really all narrative now? If the news just two warring novels?