SATURDAY: Who was helped by what Hope Hicks said?

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2024

It depends on which channel you watch: Do we the people get the national discourse we deserve?

We wouldn't recommend such a sour outlook. That said, the question popped into our heads this morning when we reviewed the online Washington Post.

Oof! As of 8:30 this very morning, these were the famous newspaper's five "most read" submissions:

MOST READ, The Washington Post

1) Advice: 
Carolyn Hax chat: My boyfriend’s closest confidante is his on-again, off-again ex

2) Tom Selleck is 79 and, whew, just look at this magnificent specimen

3) Analysis:
Kristi Noem just won’t stop talking about killing her dog

4) Advice:
Carolyn Hax: Longtime friend won’t forgive being last-minute canceled for a guy

5) Hope Hicks gets teary testifying at Trump’s hush money trial

As Shelley once suggested, gaze upon our works! 

In this morning's print edition of the Post, the news report about the Hicks testimony is the featured report on the paper's front page. In the paper's online edition, we had to scroll way down the page on order to find it at all.

Dogs and Tom Selleck and boyfriends oh my! So Blue America's reading selections may be inclined to drift.

Regarding yesterday's testimony by Hicks, we'd say that the Associated Press joined the Post in offering an account which seemed to be fair and balanced. 

Did her testimony help the prosecution, or may it even have helped the defense? Especially for those who weren't physically present, there's no perfect way to tell.

That said, you can read the AP's treatment just by clicking here. Headline included, here are some of the relevant sections of the Post's front-page report:

Hope Hicks gets teary testifying at Trump’s hush money trial

[...]

Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office wanted Hicks to show the jury how worried the 2016 Trump campaign was about negative stories about him and women—a key element in Trump’s alleged motive in the hush money case.

Her testimony seemed to accomplish that limited goal, but overall her tenor was respectful and complimentary of Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president in the November election; far from an aide turning against her former boss, she came across as a still-loyal and reluctant participant in his prosecution.

[...]

For prosecutors, the main purpose of Hicks’s testimony seemed to be showing that Trump and his campaign were very concerned about allegations made against him by women.

When it came to the Daniels story, which surfaced publicly [in 2018] while he was in the White House, Hicks said Trump told her that “it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”

As soon as Hicks said that, prosecutors ended their questioning.

Her testimony, while emotional at one moment, did not offer any major revelations or surprises, but it adds to prosecutors’ larger point that Trump was motivated to keep scandalous stories out of the public eye during the election.

But Hicks’s account also made clear that her former boss was concerned about the potential effect of the allegations on his family.

When the Journal published a story in early November 2016 about the National Enquirer buying the rights to a Playboy model’s tale of an affair with Trump—a purchase the tabloid made for the express purpose of keeping the allegation quiet—Hicks said the presidential candidate worried about Melania Trump’s reaction.

She said Trump was “concerned about the story, he was concerned about how it would be viewed by his wife, and he wanted me to make sure that the newspapers weren’t delivered to their residence that morning.”

In the judgment of the Post's reporters, the testimony had cut one way, then also cut another. The judgment of the AP's reporters followed a similar track.

As Walter Cronkite might have said, and that's the way it possibly was! Unless you were watching cable news, where a pair of battling corporate cadres seemed inclined to offer tribal viewers the stories such viewers might like.

On Blue America's channel of record, the onslaught began at 4 o'clock when Nicolle Wallace went on the air. Soon, she was introducing "some of our most favorite reporters and friends" to help her with the task at hand.

(Is "most favorite" a redundancy? We still aren't entirely sure.)

"Lucky for us," the New York Times' Susanne Craig was at the table, we were apparently told. (Wallace swallowed her words at this point.) 

Wallace then threw to "my friend and colleague, NBC News' Vaughan Hillyard," who was reporting live and direct from outside the Manhattan courtroom.

We viewers knew we were safely ensconced within the cocoon of the clan. What followed was a highly selective account of what Hicks had said, and of what it had plainly meant.

Within a matter of minutes, the gilding of the lily was general over the cable news program. By 4:09, Wallace and Craig were completing each other's sentences:

CRAIG (5/3/24): It felt like a confession that she had come forward and said this.

WALLACE: Well, I mean, that's the heart of their case, is that by [20]18, he said, "Yeah, I paid for it, but thank God it didn't come out"—

CRAIG (interrupting): —"Thank God it didn't come out and influence the election." And it was just this moment. And then she kept tearing up as the cross-examination of her continued, and it was such an emotional moment today.

The panelists had the official transcript of the testimony. By now, though, they were paraphrasing rather freely. They may have seemed to be quoting Hicks or Trump as they pleasured us in this manner.

 At this point, up stepped former prosecutor Kristi Greenberg, who proceeded to offer this:

GREENBERG (continuing directly): Yeah, and what I would say, you cannot overstate just how significant this testimony was...She went up there and she told the truth. She said, "Yeah! This clearly mattered to him. This was about the campaign."  As you said, that is the whole ballgame here...

This was like the mike-drop moment the prosecution ended with. And then, she really, you know, said, "Yes! You know, this mattered, he understood this was about the campaign."

She didn't have to do it, and she did. And it, I think, is so damaging to his case.

She was paraphrasing freely too, with her paraphrases possibly seeming to take the form of apparent quotations.

"I felt like it was a confession," Craig said all over again.

"I mean, this is whole case," Wallace added. "This was the bombshell testimony that proves this was it."

On Blue America's corporate channel, reliable favorites offered creative paraphrase of the various things Hicks supposedly said that Donald J. Trump had said.

Her testimony had been a bombshell. It had been the whole case. 

You couldn't overstate how significant it had been. It was the whole ballgame, viewers were told. "It felt like a confession."

These town criers restricted themselves to roughly half of what it seems that Hicks actually said. Later, on the Fox News Channel, the sifted accounts of what had been said were almost surely crazier and were more absurdly selective.

According to the banshees of the Fox News Channel, Hicks' testimony had pretty much cinched the trial—in this case, in favor of Donald J. Trump! 

Wallace and her gaggle of favorites had skipped past the remarks Trump apparently made about keeping the news from his family and his wife. Now, the gaggle of gargoyles on the Murdoch machine mentioned nothing else.

For whatever reason, the Internet Archive is currently struggling. We can't link you to Fox News programs at the present time.

But just as the Wallace gang offered the moments which cut one way, Fox personnel spent the night stampeding their viewers off in the other direction. In their account, the case against Trump had basically come to an end, thanks to what Hicks had said.

Meanwhile, how about that man, Tom Selleck? Good lord, is that guy a hunk! 

(We'll try to link you to Fox News accounts later on, once the Internet Archive is back.)

Final point:

How will Hicks' testimony cut with the Gotham jury? We don't have any way of knowing, and neither does anyone else.