Narratology: Night of the Hunter

Catherine Herridge interviews Donald Trump July 14, 2020 for CBS—the one where she asked him why Black people are killed by police and he replied, "So are white people."

A couple of weeks or so ago, CBS News ran a story about the Hunter Biden laptop that didn't get a lot of attention outside the rightwing outlets, by Catherine Herridge, who joined CBS in April 2021 after two decades as a correspondent for Fox News, because she wanted to be on "a team where facts and storytelling will always matter," she said at the time, but it quickly began to look as if it was because a better place to launder the "exclusive" propaganda material from dubious rightwing sources that has long been her stock in trade.

It's very appropriate that Catherine Herridge landed this interview after misrepresenting so much of what Barr and Grenell were feeding her in recent weeks.

Congratulations to Herridge for earning it! https://t.co/M5LfaT0uVf

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 7, 2020

I didn't watch the CBS piece, but I did read an account of it at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, under an alarming headline:

You thought he was nuts before?

Vincent Price in Michael Reeves's Witchfinder General (1968).

New Post added at Balloon Juice - Our Lying Eyes -https://t.co/c5DUOmxW3S pic.twitter.com/hNMdyZaUuN

— Nuck Fazis! (@Johngcole) August 30, 2018

Read the BJ piece, but this looks weirder to me than an unusually crazy lie.

It's true that there are rumors of impending demise for NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, and spread through a venue that is famously on Trump's reading list, the New York Post's Page Six, but they have nothing to do with Lester Holt: indeed, some of Lack's mistakes look like things Trump would have approved of, following the Matt Lauer #MeToo crisis:

there’s still-lingering questions about why NBC News sat on the infamous “Access Hollywood” “Grab em by the p - - - y” Donald Trump tape, and why they refused to run Ronan Farrow’s exposé on Harvey Weinstein before he went to the New Yorker.

Plus, there’s [Megyn] Kelly’s $20 million-a-year deal personally made by Lack for the ex-Fox News star to host the soft third hour of “Today.” Despite a recent improvement in ratings, her numbers are still down 30 percent in the key demo compared to 2017...

But I can't find any suggestion that NBC newscaster Lester Holt is in trouble, or ever has been, over anything, least of all his interview of the president of 11 May 2017 when he got Trump to confirm, two days after firing FBI director James Comey, that he had done it to halt the Trump-Russia investigation:

None Durst Call it Treason

Apparently New York's crypto-Communist mayor-elect Bill de Blasio divulged his secret intentions of collectivizing the real estate market, some time before the election, according to the New York Post:

“Everything you heard about me is true. . . I am not a free-marketeer. . . I believe in the heavy hand of government,” de Blasio stated matter-of-factly during an hour-long presentation to some of the city’s biggest real-estate developers.

Author of the story is Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino, who also put it on the air yesterday. No source of any kind is cited other than Charlie's personal contacts who witnessed the remarkable performance.

Of course it stands to reason that if de Blasio wanted to reveal the terrifying truth to some group of people who could be trusted to understand and keep it quiet until after the election he would choose

 Jared Kushner of Kushner Properties, Stephen Green of SL Green Realty, Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization and Jeff Blau, chief executive of the Related Companies. Scott Rechler of RXR Realty... hosted the event at his offices.

Because those guys are naturally so sympathetic to Leninist attacks on private property rights. On Gasparino's general reliability, I'll let the trade speak:

@CGasparino Might be the last time you got one right, as well.
— Richard Melville (@richmelville) November 1, 2013

The Boy-is-my-face-red Line

Via Newseum (the Post doesn't put its own covers on line).

Ah, yes, Rupert, and by the way—how many Iranian nukes has that feckless Bam* failed to strike over the past five years of not really meaning it? I guess that would be zero, on account of the policy apparently working fairly well, wouldn't it? What the feck, huh?

And as long as you're up, how many Iranian cancer patients have been saved by 20% uranium produced in Iran because US policy has made it a violation of international law to sell it to them? How many, if any, have died because there wasn't enough of it? I have no idea, but I believe you have some of those people around your shop that know how to find out—what do you call them? Journalists?

*Ooh, Poddy, you do know some trenchant adjectives! And how kind of you to publish them in the Post, for readers that don't get to see that many adjectives at all.