Mind if we dance with your dates?

Q: Is the Murdoch press really, really scared of black people?
A: You make the call!

The federal grand jury handing down indictments for special counsel Robert Mueller doesn’t appear to include any supporters of President Donald Trump, according to one witness who recently testified before the panel.

“The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,” my source said. “Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]”

Well, thanks for the brackets. Could we go into some journalistic detail?

Of the 20 jurors, 11 are African-Americans and two were wearing “peace T-shirts,” the witness said. “There was only one white male in the room, and he was a prosecutor.” Mueller was not present.

This wouldn't be one of those unnamed sources, would it? Because everybody knows those are fake.

... My source said, “That room isn’t a room where POTUS gets a fair shake.”

And what kind of tabloid is it where the prescriptive ghost of Hildy Johnson doesn't slap you around with a wet AP Stylebook for saying indictments are handed "down"?

The dead and the naked

Episodic double murders are always a candidate for glory at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, but what makes some episodic double murders more Foxalicious than others? This one, for example, started Sunday morning at the No. 4 position, with "Killed By A Monster" at the top of the page. Let's have a look at Fox works to shape the raw material into the perfect story for its readers.

First, the headline -- fine as far as it goes, but nothing there that would set this apart from any other set of murders on Christmas Eve. "Workplace violence" doesn't elevate matters; you can't bend it far enough to make contact with the Two Minutes Hate angle. And there's nothing very exciting about the art: basically a mug shot of some post boxes. Hard to believe a Fox staffer missed the obvious angle that perked things up around 10:30 a.m.:

Relatives and friends of two Ohio postal workers slain by an enraged, naked coworker were at a loss to explain the violence that occurred Saturday morning.

So we've managed to get "naked" into the hed, but -- Sweet Norman Mailer, who's naked and who's dead? The original hed (and the url) are the usual way we -- well, certainly we headline writers -- think of "X's slaying": "the slaying of X." We'd need another prepositional phrase to get "X's slaying of two colleagues" out of it, and when the verb becomes singular, matters get even messier. 

Still, the commenters have picked up on something else that slipped past the Fox editors:

DeShaune is it? Uh-huh.

So about 11:39, the next angle falls into place:

 The headline is the same syntactic hash, but now it's a real Fox story. Right, commenters?
Read more »

Today in framing

Judging from Wednesday's centerpiece, bb dayorder was received and understood at the Washington Times*: Massster speaks and the Times listens!

For all of President Trump’s celebrated battles with the media, he is also allowing the press more extended access to some of his White House meetings than previous presidents did.

Did you ever wonder about how the president's celebrated openness looks elsewhere? Say, at Military Times?

White House officials held their first listening session on problems with the Department of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday, but without inviting prominent members of the veterans community to the event.

What fun could be had at White House briefings if topics like this came up! In the good old days, you'll recall, the president would occasionally bring things like the Iron Cross to bestow on particularly offensive tools of the far-right press. Perhaps those days could return.

* How quickly things change. The reporter seems to be vastly less interested in how often the president plays golf than he was a few months ago.

Today in cognitive dissonance

Well, there's the problem. Turn your back on the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to cook dinner or grade papers or something, and there's something freshly bizarre that pushes the morning's apparent bizarritude to the back burner.

This one, I think, is interesting, because Friday evening's top story is basically a first-class ticket on the unheated cattle car to Siberia: an admission that Massster's unhinged racism might present a real challenge to actual US interests.

President Trump signed an executive order Friday designed to “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals” by temporarily suspending the entry of immigrants from several Muslim majority countries –Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

While the proposal is not finalized, it is already drawing outrage among some Iraqis who have taken the lead in the fight against ISIS, a defeat which the new president has said is also his top foreign policy goal.

“Iraqis are the largest victims of terrorism and now we are paying double the price,” one high-ranking general in the Iraqi Army, who requested anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media, told Fox News. “This has caused massive disappointment in the hearts of every Iraqi who is fighting radicalism.”

Another Iraqi with close ties to the Iraqi Forces Intelligence community said the proposed ban symbolically sends a message that “their lives are cheap.” Others conveyed fear given that they have been waiting in-line for resettlement for years – their lives under militia threat for their American associations – only to now be told that they may not make it out. 

The first few grafs might be a surprise to whoever pushed the buttons to create the graphic that follows, which is about a different country (more in line with bb dayorder) altogether:

Which, distractionwise, helps set the stage for the evening's No. 2 story. Take it away, Fox psychiatrist* Keith Ablow!

The media is all abuzz, again, about the fact that President Trump spent some time during his televised interview with ABC anchor David Muir pointing out the large size of the crowd in photos of his inauguration. Journalists, who still don’t seem able to understand that Trump is almost always several steps ahead of them, once again are heralding the president’s seeming preoccupation with the issue.

Is the president actually so thin-skinned that he needs the world to acknowledge that a huge number of people turned out to honor him as he was sworn in? Um, no.

So what’s really going on in his mind? Here’s my opinion: Everything Donald Trump does is strategically calculated to achieve a goal. His communication is designed not to simply convey his gut feelings, but to make people focus on one thing — call it a decoy — so he can do six other things while they’re distracted.

In this case, Trump has masterfully used the media’s pathetic naiveté and desire to battle him to make them focus on a throwaway battle — his seeming obsession with crowd size (which I can almost guarantee he could not care less about) — while he determinedly does what he does care about: signing orders that resurrect pipeline projects, retooling our broken immigration laws, laying the groundwork for a better health care system and preparing to build the wall.

Well, what if I'm a journalist who still doesn't get it?

For journalists who still don’t get it, here it is, again, in direct terms: When Trump says something like “If I were you I would take your camera and look at the size of the crowd,” he is actually saying, “Let’s debate crowd size, again, because otherwise you might ask me questions about my real and historically powerful plans and ideas, which I don’t trust you to report on fairly, anyhow.”
 
A journalist who might even come close to Trump’s level of strategic communication should then say, “Ah, the old watch this hand while I work magic with my other one? No, we shall not linger an instant on that silly issue my colleagues in the media are focused on. Let’s sit down and talk about the pipelines, again. I don’t want to walk around and snort another line of that drug you know the media is addicted to.”

Oh, good. A lesson in strategic communication! But having come this far with Dr. Ablow, let's enjoy the finish:

The drug, by the way, is called taking the easy path of the pithy, sensational, stupid story. And lots of journalists who get paid lots of money seem to be hopelessly hooked on it.

The rest of us, over the next 90 days or eight years, will watch Trump masterfully ignite one squabble after another that the members of the press fall all over themselves to engage in, while he remakes the world.

Man, I am just so happy this guy went to work for us. I’m still pinching myself. It’s like a miracle.

You have to wonder what happens when Fox staffers run into each other in the hallways.

* Who, according to his Fox bio, studied at some place called "John Hopkins." I know that's a cheap shot, but -- damn, can't you guys do anything right?