Naturally, the story about the Stormy Daniels interview that’s dominating the blogosphere right now is about …  how good 60 Minutes’ RATINGS were. Nothing could better describe the seriousness of our national media (remember, small bloggers no longer chart, the blogosphere having been taken over by major media blogs, just as they’re starting their takeover of the podcast universe):

Stormy Daniels Attracts 22 Million Viewers to ‘60 Minutes’
John Koblin / New York Times

—  Stormy Daniels is a ratings blockbuster.  —  CBS’s “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday night featuring the pornographic film actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, garnered the highest ratings for the program in almost a decade….

Uh, yeah.

Several of those “viewers” were  on display on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning.

I’m not going to go into a “blow by blow,” but, frankly, Stormy Daniels comported herself with more dignity and credibility than did those “media professionals.”

Exhibit A: “Morning,” Joe Scarborough–having finally made sense for the first time in his career with his op-ed in the Washington Post about the long descent into madness of the modern conservative movement–must have felt uncomfortable in the “sane” category and immediately moved to remedy that perception. Let’s set the scene:

MORNING JOE 3/26/18
Will the Daniels interview impact Trump?
The Washington Examiner’s Hugo Gurdon and Sarah Westwood and Ari Melber join Morning Joe to discuss the latest shakeups in the president’s cabinet, Stormy Daniels’ ’60 Minutes’ interview and the latest in the Mueller investigation. Duration: 13:16*

[* I’m not going to bother with a link, since it will become obsolete so quickly that it ‘s not worth the trouble. And I don’t feel like converting downloaded video and posting it to youtube — the usual blogospheric workaround.]

We begin with this Special Mention of Demerit @ 10:42 The Washington Examiner‘s Hugo Gurdon:

“I don’t think it will directly damage President Trump. He was elected when everybody knew he was a philanderer — rather in the same way Bill Clinton was that is not going to stand against him in a direct way although a lot of people will find it extremely distasteful and and and naturally so.”

All one long, run-on sentence without pauses and punctuated, therefore, precisely as such.

The moral contortions embodied in that short declarative self-contradiction of a sentence would take longer to limn than a possibly futile attempt to diagram it. Note the FAVORITE argument of the intellectually bankrupt Faux Nooz gaggle: two wrongs DO make a right!  Or, the term for that fallacy in a language older than the language the speaker is speaking it in: Tu Quoque. “You too!”

It is a fallacy, and the failure of any talking head, politician or political columnist to ever not that it IS a fallacy, and, therefore, NOT an argument at all, bespeaks the depths mind-numbing stupidity and brutally intentional UNedumacation that this country has fallen into*.

[* Viz. Ignorance is an outright virtue and it is a shameful thing to KNOW THINGS and READ BOOKS.]

The Right already (both before and AFTER the impeachment of Bill Clinton over a blowjob) has,  for twenty years,  continuously propounded that this argument is utterly false. No one may suddenly dust it off and claim “Tu Quoque” as a serious argument — even if he DOES hem and haw about disgusting behavior of the asylum inmate residing in the White House.

So, the notion that this whole “paying a porn star hush money” to manipulate an election is suddenly, for the first time in American history NOT really news …. is the takeaway?

Morning Joe and Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer

What ever happened to “Make America Great Again”? Arguably this accomplishes the opposite. But let’s turn back to the hack attack.

MORNING JOE 3/26/18
Michael Avenatti says Stormy Daniels wants lies, deception to…
Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti joins Morning Joe the day after Daniels’ ’60 Minutes’ interview to discuss the questions that went unasked and what does Daniels ultimately want after going public with her story. Duration: 17:25

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer came on after an equally bullying interview on NBC’s Today show. Evidently there were two talking points that anyone with a brain could have figured out, but that would pretty much disqualify a large swath of NBC News, one supposes.

Avenatti is asked WHY he won’t release the implied photos on the CD rom disk he tweeted out over the weekend:

“What’s on that CD and why didn’t we hear from Stormy Daniels last night on the contents of that CD .. that you were teasing out last week?”

… opens Morning Joe.

Fair enough, although the notion that the CD was anything OTHER than a coded You know what’s on here, Donald, and WE know what’s on here, Donald, and do you REALLY want everybody to see what’s on here, Donald? would seem patently ridiculous to the average tree frog. But we’re talking Morning Joe, here, and NOT the average tree frog. In other words, we begin with the false premise that somehow Stormy and Mikey made a “contract” with the infotainment industry to divulge the contents of the CD ROM, KNOWING that it would hurt their own lawsuit.

Avenetti ‘splains:

Well, we’re not going to disclose it here this morning as to the content of it and I think the reason why uh I’m not going to do it this morning and the reason why you didn’t hear from her last night about it iss that we’re in the process of .. we’re in the middle of a lawsuit, a legal fight and we’re gonna be strategic, we’re gonna be surgical in the way we go about this and .. I understand that ..  let me finish …

CROSS TALK AS MORNING JOE INTERRUPTS:

YEAH BUT BUT BUT BUT didn’t you do a hashtag that said “60 Minutes”on there, suggesting that you were gonna reveal the contents of that on 60 Minutes?

One notes that “hashtags” have not yet been accepted as binding legal or social contracts, but, as Otter says to Boone during Bluto’s penultimate speech in Animal House:

Otter: [to Boon] Germans?

Boon: Forget it, he’s rolling.

Avenetti attempts for the hundredth time that morning to explain that

No I think I made it clear that in the appearances that followed that was a warning shot to the president and Mr. Cohen [Trump’s payoff attorney] relating to the fact that if they were gonna come out after the show and declaring that this did not happen or call my client a liar that there were going to be consequences. And what’s interesting is is that we haven’t heard from ’em this morning.

They haven’t denied the affair. They haven’t denied the fact that the president knew about the agreement. They haven’t denied that he knew about the hundred and thirty thousand dollars …

Morning Joe interrupts again:

They’re threatening YOU. I mean they’re threatening you they’re threatening your client so release .. if you were holding that to have leverage over them in case they were threatening you then ‘game on.’ They threatened you. So what’s on the CD?

Avenetti patiently restates:

Again, I’m not going to release the CD….

And this basic conversation continues, in various guises for the remainder of the seventeen minute interview.

As it had continued on the Today show. Avenetti has, at this point been badgered by NBC News employees and hangers-on over this one EASY TO UNDERSTAND POINT for a couple of  hours, by now.

So: are they stupid, or merely imbeciles?

Perhaps that’s unfair. The important point here, however, is simple, if subtle:

At this point Morning Joe and his Gang of Gigglers are no longer COVERING the news. They are intentionally SHAPING the news. Instead of commenting on the interview, they (at one point, aided by the increasingly fringie and no-longer-making-good-sense Dershowitzian J0nathan Turley)  are CRITIQUING the interview:

MORNING JOE 3/26/18
Some questions go unasked in Stormy Daniels interview
During a Sunday interview with ’60 Minutes,’ adult film star Stormy Daniels stated she was threatened in 2011 and told not to go public with her story of a relationship with Donald Trump. The panel discusses. Duration: 18:39

The SINGLE talking point that the talking heads devolve to is this: how come Anderson Cooper didn’t show Stormy Daniels mug shots of Trump intimates and try to ID the person who threatened her in Las Vegas?*

[* And how come not one of these “worldly” and “knowing pundits noticed the corollary: Trump is KNOWN for having mob connections and was even partying with a well-known mobster at Mar-a-Lago on the New Years’ preceding his inauguration! Isn’t there something to this “intimidation” story that ought to be endlessly dragged through the infinite speculation of the information-challenged narrators? How come that bit of common wisdom isn’t worthy of mention?]

Er, because that wasn’t the point of the interview? Because we saw twenty or thirty minutes of hours of interviews and there wasn’t time to consult Morning Joe and Jonathan Turley on NBC for a CBS interview? Because Morning Joe did the legal profession a favor when he got into politics and stopped practicing?

There’s a lot more of this (including John Heilmann’s hilarious grilling of Avenetti indicating that Heilmann NEVER REALLY WATCHED the 60 Minutes interview — because many of his questions had been answered IN that interview!) but you get the point.

Again, critically: they are shaping the narrative. Not reporting it.

Which is why the media is MORE concerned this morning with the 60 Minutes RATINGS than the 60 Minutes CONTENT.

And why you shouldn’t wonder that this self-same media, as a class, sold us out by not covering George W. Bush’s usurpation and Donald J. Trump’s usurpation.

That’s what we need to be afraid of.

We are being fed Orwellian fictions by our “free press.”

Anderson Cooper’s Stormy Daniels interview draws highest ratings for ‘60 Minutes’ in 10 years
Brian Stelter / CNNMoney

—  Stormy Daniels: ‘I have no reason to lie’  —  Anderson Cooper’s interview with Stormy Daniels propelled “60 Minutes” to its highest-rated episode in 10 years, according to Nielsen ratings….

While critics grumble that [Daniels’ Lawyer Michael] Avenatti may be overplaying his hand, Sunday’s Sunday’s “60 Minutes” broadcast was undeniably newsworthy. The broadcast contained new information about the alleged affair in 2006 and marked the first time that Daniels described being threatened by an unknown person in 2011, a few weeks after she agreed to talk to a tabloid magazine about Trump. “I think it was important for people to actually see her and hear her,” Cooper said on CNN’s “New Day” on Monday. “Viewers can make up their own mind whether they believe she’s credible,” he added.  [emphasis added]

Mostly because, for all its opinion-driven infotainment masquerading as news, no conclusions can ever be drawn by our pundits.

That might smack of thinking.

Courage.

Cross-posted from his vorpal sword