MSNBC is predictably very excited about the prospect of their chief political opponent being sidelined by an indictment, prosecution, and potentially, jail time. They’ve been spiking the football hard.
And now they’re lobbying equally hard to get cameras inside of the courtroom so as to create as large of a spectacle as possible for their circus trial.
“I worry that without a televised trial, like the OJ trial, you know, it would be the trial of the century. This is the most important case… of our lifetime,” the MSNBC Race Lady prompts her guest. “Without a televised trial, it’s just going to be us saying it. And saying what happened every day.”
“Why is it that we could televise the OJ trial decades ago — that was in the 90s — and people could see what actually happened in the courtroom… [The media] weren’t able to make stuff up, because they saw it in real time,” former senator Claire McCaskill, now a crack MSNBC political analyst, rhetorically opines. “There ought to be an opportunity in this kind of historic trial that everybody sees the evidence as admitted into our courts of law. It would reassure them about our rule of law.”
(As an aside, I would hope for the sake of our sacred democracy that McCaskill, who served for years in the Senate, knows that the reason the OJ trial could be televised but the Trump one, so far, won’t be is that the former took place in a California state court where cameras are allowed and the latter will take place in a federal court where cameras are not.)
Related: FLASHBACK: Rush Limbaugh Predicted Democrats Would Indict Trump
The ultimate reason, of course — besides the propaganda value of clipping out sensational moments of the trial to feed to their ultra-lib NPC viewers — of having cameras present for the proceedings would be the ratings boon. MSNBC would be nothing without Trump coverage. It’s literally almost all they talk about.
Remember when now-fired CNN host Brian Stelter, responding to the accurate observation that “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” claimed that his bosses didn’t care about ratings, and the whole audience laughed in his face? It’s truly a delicious clip of a hopeless bubble boy getting his bubble burst in front of a live audience, and so I don’t care if inserting here is gratuitous or too tangential.
Ted Koppel to Brian Stelter ~
You'd be Lost without Donald Trump ..
CNN's Ratings would be in the Toilet without Donald Trump 😂pic.twitter.com/89QJX6T4Oe
— Lawyerforlaws (@lawyer4laws) August 21, 2022
I agree, actually, for reasons that I’ve laid out elsewhere, that federal courts should be open to cameras — but not for MSNBC’s ratings. Rather, it’s important to see what the government does in our name with our money in the full light of day.
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