Wednesday, October 03, 2018

If journalists would read this, it just might

end some of their whining about not being respected.  Because they'd have some respect again.
I listened to an MSNBC host this morning sound almost panicked about how the FBI might not be able to confirm Julie Swetnick’s — absolutely ludicrous — charges against Kavanaugh even as she reported that NBC couldn’t confirm any of it. The urgency wasn’t that the media let Michael Avenatti play them all for suckers, but that it might be just too difficult to prove allegations Swetnick herself walked back almost entirely. In other words the fear, palpable in many quarters, is that the charges might unravel prematurely, and so the press must start raveling them.

Or, in other cases they must spin new ones. Hence the New York Times’ decision — for which they’ve now apologized — of assigning deeply (and openly) partisan reporter Emily Bazelon to go spelunking for the latest bombshell: that Brett Kavanaugh threw some ice at a bar scuffle while in college.

Meanwhile, whole panels of pundits and experts on MSNBC are made up of people who cannot imagine why Kavanaugh might be upset at the unverified, uncorroborated, and literally unbelievable claim that he ran a rape gang when he was 15. Instead, we get hours of hand-wringing every day about his supposedly unjudicial temperament, as if any judge or justice on the bench, now or ever, would be expected to remain calm under such circumstances.
I know, expecting journalists to read this, and understand it?  Fat chance.

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