CNN and Baltimore: A Crossfire With 100 Percent Casualties
There’s a joke you can see almost anytime there’s breaking news about violence. Some Auburn fans beat up some Alabama fans before the Iron Bowl, say, and a sour journalist quips, “When will moderate Auburn fans condemn the actions of extremist Auburn fans?” Repeat for any topic. This framework comes most recently from the tired conservative refrain, “Why won’t moderate Muslims condemn extremism?” (They usually already have.)
This is an old trope, one in which the American media demands that any non-hegemonic group leaders — from any racial or gender or social minority — condemn the actions of any hammershit fool who does anything ugly while existing within their demographic. This is often the initial engagement of any minority, regarding any minority action, regardless of the merits of that minority action. Thank you for being on our show, and we’ll get to your concerns in a moment, but first, apologize and explain yourself. Like the old political line, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” By the time they’re done defending their mere existence, there’s no time left for their points. You can silence any problem by running out the clock.
But maybe this is all rather abstract, so let’s make fun of Wolf Blitzer.
Blitzer is a man of breathtaking stupidity, who daily belies his catchphrase of “watching very closely” with a myopia that dwarfs Mr. Magoo’s. He once famously racked up –$4,600 on Celebrity Jeopardy! a version of the show dumbed down to raise extra money for charity. This is a man who broadcasts information for a living. Compare that to one of his opponents — Andy Richter, whose job is portraying an everyman for laughs, and who tells Mike Ditka stories in the middle of the night. Even after producers zeroed out Wolf’s debt and gave him $1,000 to bet with, Andy ultimately beat him by $66,000.
Blitzer’s service seems to be offering permanent credulity to power and permanent skepticism to its challengers. He can be induced to parrot talking points by even junior-varsity hacks. During an IDF-guided gee-whiz tour of Hamas tunnels during the most recent bombing of Gaza, he would have thrown more elbows if he’d said, “I like to be the little spoon when we sleep, but I roll over a lot.” He once displayed outright alarm that WikiLeaks information would fall into the hands of journalists. If he could reanimate the corpse of someone shot in the back by police to ask one question, it would probably be, “Why did you do this?”
So his interview yesterday with community organizer DeRay McKesson about Monday night’s rioting in Baltimore couldn’t have been more Blitzerian even via the intervention of a force foreign to him, like effort.
Raw Story posted highlights and video, so click over if you want a fuller experience. After asking McKesson about his plan for the day’s protests and ignoring his reply, here are Blitzer’s questions, in order: