Telling Us What We've Just Seen

After watching the second day of the impeachment hearings, and then the CNN/MSNBC reports on them, I'm convinced that the "mainstream media" thinks we're all idiots. 

The hearings themselves were plodding and picky, and full of congresscritters asking blatantly leading questions.  Today it was ex-ambassador Yovanovitch obediently being led into giving the right answers.  For instance, when asked about how she lost her job, she mentioned that she got a phonecall from her immediate boss saying that there was a question about her "security";  she asked if this was her physical security, and was told no -- she was just being ordered home, and thought this was "irregular".  Assorted Democrats then asked her if she thought this was "intimidation", to which she obediently replied yes.  About then Trump sent out a tweet that grumbled about Yovanovitch, the congresscritters picked up on it, and asked if she thought his complaints were "intimidation" -- to which she promptly agreed.  The newsies reported, on the news directly afterward, that Trump was "intimidating witnesses".  Uhuh.

I recall that when Trump fired Comey, a couple years back, MSNBC showed an interview with Trump in which the reporter asked: "Didn't you think about how it would look?" -- referring to the then active Mueller investigation.  Trump replied: "Sure I thought about it" -- meaning how it would look -- and then went on to say that the investigation was all BS anyway, so "I went ahead and fired him."  Immediately after that, the camera cut to Rachel Maddow saying: "There you have it, people.  Trump just admitted that he fired Comey to stop the investigation."  In other words, she told us that what we had just seen and heard for ourselves wasn't what really happened. 

I have to wonder just how stupid the media think we are, that they can tell us something different from what we've seen and heard and expect that we'll believe it.

This also makes me doubt everything they say about incidents we haven't directly seen and heard.  Back when I was working for a union newspaper in Chicago, I learned how to analyze photographs -- and eventually videos -- and since then I've seen case after case of the media showing pictures and telling stories about them, "interpretations", that don't match the visible facts.  The media have been getting away with this for decades without being caught, or at least without a major scandal about it, so I suppose they think they can expand the tactic and nobody will notice. 

Well, some people have noticed.  No less than Alan Dershowitz, the ultimate liberal lawyer, went up on the Internet and denounced the impeachment proceedings on legal and constitutional grounds: including the congresscritters' cherry-picking of witnesses, behind-closed-doors hearings, extensive use of hearsay ("he-said-that-she-said-that-Trump-siad"), and -- yes -- leading -- of witnesses.  He had to publish his complaint on the Internet because the mainstream media wouldn't hear him.  This is incredible, considering how they used to hang on his every word back when he was attacking racially-biased laws.  In short, when he took up this subject they quietly censored him. 

Less famous citizens have noticed too, which is probably why the more obviously left-biased media have been losing their audiences.  It takes a bit of searching to discover this, but both CNN and the venerable New York Times are worried about how much they've lost viewers.  To be fair, Fox News has lost viewers too, but not on the same scale.  It seems that the citizens are voting with their attention as well as their dollars, forsaking the mainstream media for the vast and varied sources of the Internet.  This can be both liberating and dangerous, since a plethora of information sources are hard to track down and verify.  Still, it can't be worse than a near-monopoly on news reporting that treats its viewers as idiots.

And in my opinion, Trump should fire the inept Giuliani and hire Alan Dershowitz as his lawyer.

--Leslie <;)))><