SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2024
Can you believe these clans? Can you believe the factual claims you hear from our warring clans?
You can if you love the "novelization of news." You can believe what you hear if you love soap operas or pro wrestling—if you love Storyline.
Yesterday afternoon, Nicolle Wallace kept pouring it on concerning the release of the original Juror #2 from jury duty in the Trump "hush money" trial.
On Tuesday, the person in question had been selected for duty. She was listed as Juror #2.
On Thursday, she returned to court and asked to be excused from duty.
She said that her family and friends had discerned her identity from detailed news reports. She said this was creating a pressure which would affect her ability to serve.
How did this juror's family and friends know she'd been picked as a juror? In various news reports, she had been described as a highly specific type of nurse. The Manhattan neighborhood in which she lived had also been reported.
On that basis, family and friends had called to ask if she was Juror #2. She told Judge Merchan that pressure from family and freidns would make it hard for her to perform as an unbaised juror, and she was released from duty.
Yesterday afternoon, Wallace continued to beat this drum on her two-hour daily program. Also, she kept maintaining that this problem had been caused by the Fox News Channel.
She offered no evidence in support of that claim. We know of zero reason to believe that the claim is accurate.
That was Wallace, on Day Two, continuing with a pleasing though unsupported claim. The previous evening, an eruption had happened on Lawrence O'Donnell's nightly program, The Last Word.
O'Donnell is experienced, and he's smart, at least by human standards. He also tends toward a bit of an anger problem. (No one is perfect.)
Beyond that, he has a bizarre attraction to the claim that the people with whom he disagrees are "lying" all the time.
There are few misstatements, mistakes or speculations in O'Donnell's world. At the start of Thursday night's program, he offered an aggressive claim, one which has yet to be adjudicated:
He claimed that Defendant Trump had violated a prevailing gag order in the more egregious way possible, Along the way, he extended some of the claims which Wallace had pushed that afternoon.
He made some factual claims which were accurate. He made other claims which were not. Everyone was lying, of course.
We'll join his screed in progress:
O'DONNELL (4/18/24): ...The Trump lawyers insisted that the gag order did not prevent, quote, "reposting statements that are already in public by others."
That is, of course, another lie told by a Trump lawyer in court directly to a judge.
The gag order prevents Donald Trump from, quote, "making or directing others to make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror in this criminal proceeding."
Here is the lie that Jesse Watters told on Fox yesterday at 5:28 p.m., when Donald Trump was watching.
WATTERS (videotape): They are trying to rig this jury. They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge.
O'DONNELL: Jesse Watters is the newest liar to occupy the 8:00 p.m. slot on Fox, the lying channel, a network that has been adjudicated to have told $787.5 million worth of lies in a defamation case.
The previous occupant of the 8 p.m. slot had told so many of those lies, that even Fox decided they had to let him go.
[...]
Jesse Watters was taught how to lie on TV by his mentor, the now banished Bill O'Reilly.
Jesse Watters said they are trying to rig the jury. That is a lie.
Jesse Watters said they are catching underground liberal activists. That is a lie. There has not been a single liberal activist or conservative activist revealed in the jury selection process, not one.
And Jesse Watters said that they are lying to the judge, and that is a lie. That is a pure Bill O'Reilly, Jesse Watters-style lie, invented from absolutely nothing.
And eighteen minutes after Jesse Watters extemporaneously delivered that lie on the Fox Lying Channel, Donald Trump wrote this lie:
"They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge in order to get on the Trump jury."
And Donald Trump assigned that lie, in quotation marks, to Jesse Watters.
You're getting the general idea. We return to our basic question:
Can you believe the factual claims you hear from our warring clans? We'll focus here on the claims by O'Donnell.
We'll start with an obvious misstatement:
Jesse Watters didn't make the statement in question at 5:28 on Wednesday afternoon. Nor did Donald Trump see him do so.
In fact, Watters made the statement in question at 5:06 that day, soon after the start of The Five. Someone tweeted the comment and the tape at 5:28 p.m., and it was soon retweeted by Trump, or by someone retweeting for him.
That was a minor misstatement of fact. Everybody makes such mistakes. We know of zero reason to regard it as a lie.
That said, O'Donnell's bombast became harder to defend as his screed went on. Let's move on to this:
Plainly, the gag order in question does involve several possible elements of ambiguity.
In at least two different ways, it could have been written more clearly. It makes little sense to accuse the defendant's attorneys of lying to the judge in that matter when they're simply observing the obligation to provide their client with a vigorous defense.
Beyond that, we soon reach the more comical part of what O'Donnell aggressively said.
Too funny! By the time of O'Donnell's screed, the original Juror #4 had been removed from the jury by Judge Merchan. To appearances, the juror had been removed because he'd been untruthful with the judge in filling out his original questionnaire.
What was the backstory here? Two reporters for Fox News seem to have asked one of the prosecutors. Headline included, this is what the pair reported early Thursday afternoon:
Trump juror previously arrested for ripping down right-leaning political ads dismissed from trial
A second juror was excused from the jury in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial on Thursday after it was revealed the man was once arrested for tearing down right-leaning political advertisements.
Juror #4, who was selected and sworn in on Tuesday, was excused by Judge Juan Merchan on Thursday morning.
The man had been arrested in Westchester, New York, for tearing town political advertisements, according to a prosecutor from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
"I actually believe the propaganda that was being ripped down was political posters that were on the right—the political right," prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said Thursday.
Steinglass said that after additional research, it also appeared that the juror’s wife had been previously accused of, or involved in a "corruption inquiry" that needed a "deferred prosecution agreement with the district attorney’s office."
Jurors are asked on a questionnaire to list whether they or someone close to them have ever been arrested.
Did Steinglass actually make those statements? It's very, very hard to believe that a pair of Fox reporters simply made that up.
(Did members of Blue America's clan ask about the backstory? Or did our own clan members somehow know that we'd rather hear Lawrence's declamations?)
To appearances, Juror #4 had been arrested at one time for destroying Republican campaign materials. He had failed to report this matter on his questionnaire, as had been required.
Did that mean that Juror #4 was "a liberal activist?" Did that mean he was "trying to get on the jury" in order to take Trump down?
We have no way of answering those questions—and neither did Watters or O'Donnell. But as O'Donnell ranted and railed about the way everybody else was lying, he was failing to offer his viewers a full and forthright account of that day's events.
He was selling an angry novelization to Blue America's voters. The night before, Watters had sold the latest of his speculative tales to their Red America counterparts.
In certain obvious ways, O'Donnell and Watters are different types. In another way, they're pretty much peas in a pod. You can't believe the things they say, unless you love Storyline.
Meanwhile, back to Wallace:
On Friday afternoon, she continued to claim that it was the Fox News Channel which had revealed so much information about Juror #2 that she had to be relieved from service on the jury.
Wallace had made that claim on Thursday's show, directly blaming Watters while offering zero evidence in support of her accusation. On Friday's show, she repeated her unsupported claim. This time, she restricted her accusation to unnamed players at Fox.
Given a day to rethink her case, Wallace still offered zero evidence in support of that claim. For ourselves, we know of zero reason to believe those claims are true.
Did Juror #2's family and friends see Watters describe this juror? Are they big viewers of Fox?
In fact, Watters did describe Juror #2 when he spoke with a jury consultant / "body language expert" on Wednesday evening's show.
On that occasion, he did describe Juror #4 as a nurse. He didn't cite the highly specific type of nursing which helped her family and friends suspect that she was the juror in question.
Also, Watters did name the Manhattan neighborhood in which Juror #2 resides. But as we noted yesterday, that sort of information had been reported by an array of major news orgs as jury selection began.
That was a fairly common type of move. For example, the New York Times filed this report on Thursday afternoon, even after Jurors #2 and #4 had been relieved of duty:
What We Know About Why Two Trump Jurors Were Dismissed
A woman selected for the jury told the judge overseeing the case—the first criminal trial of a former president—that she had developed concerns about her identity being revealed. That, she said, might compromise her fairness and “decision-making in the courtroom.”
The other juror, a man from the Lower East Side, was excused after he arrived to court later Thursday morning. The precise reason for his dismissal was not immediately clear, but prosecutors had raised concerns early in the day about the credibility of answers he gave to questions about himself.
As late as Thursday afternoon, the Times was still reporting neighborhoods of residence. We know of no reason to believe that Jurur #2's family and friends heard her described by Watters—and in two straight days of accusation, Wallace presented zero reason to believe her tribally pleasing claim.
Clans have always behaved this way. They've always behaved like clans.
Our clans are behaving this way right now, Blue and Red alike.
Judged by standard journalistic norms, Jesse Watters is, on balance, a flyweight, dissembler and clown. But O'Donnell is a Vesuvius with a weirdly one-track mind and little skill at using his words.
Wallace is long, long gone.
This is Babel by way of clan. These people are narrating soap operas and reality shows.
On the brighter side, they're being paid millions of dollars per year for providing this prehuman work. Can you believe the things you hear?
Survey says the obvious. No, you pretty much can't.
