Tuesday, November 25, 2014

You Won't Be Able To Turn Off and On And Pick And Choose Who The "New Journalism" Pins A Bulls Eye On

And Liberals Will Be Its Primary Target: Your Provocative Idea For Tuesday

Here's an account of one of the accusers of Bill Cosby from People Magazine  in a piece cited by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon as what is now called evidence that Cosby is guilty of being a serial rapist.  But, first, since I have come to realize what cabloid TV and the tabloid internet have done to collective reading comprehension I will point out that this is not a comment on any other allegations that have or will be made, this is dealing only with what is alleged here*.   And I am assuming that the woman making the accusation is included among the 15 or 17 or who knows how many it is this morning being cited by the media.  I have yet to see a clear and consistent list of who is represented by that number.

It was in a hotel in Reno, claims Bowman, that Cosby assaulted her one night in 1986. "He took my hand and his hand over it, and he masturbated with his hand over my hand," says Bowman, who, although terrified, kept quiet about the incident and continued as Cosby's protégé because, she says, "Who's gonna believe this? He was a powerful man. He was like the president." Before long she was alone with Cosby again in his Manhattan townhouse; she was given a glass of red wine, and "the next thing I know, I'm sick and I'm nauseous and I'm delusional and I'm limp and ... I can't think straight.... And I just came to, and I'm wearing a [men's] T-shirt that wasn't mine, and he was in a white robe." 

A month or two later, she was in Atlantic City and says she was given another glass of red wine and felt "completely doped up again." Confused, Bowman somehow made it back to her room, but the next day Cosby summoned her to his suite. After she arrived, Bowman says, Cosby "threw me on the bed and braced his arm under my neck so I couldn't move my head, and he started trying to take his clothes off. I remember all the clinking of his belt buckle. And he was trying to take my pants down, and I was trying to keep them on." Bowman says that not long after she resisted the assault, Cosby cut off contact with her and had her escorted to the airport for a flight back to Denver. She didn't tell authorities about what happened, but she did approach an attorney who "wouldn't take it seriously," says Margo Singagliese, 52, the friend who went with her to see the lawyer. 

A MONTH OR TWO LATER, SHE WAS IN ATLANTIC CITY AND SAYS SHE WAS GIVEN ANOTHER GLASS OF RED WINE.....!  AND THAT'S AFTER WHAT SHE CLAIMS HAPPENED IN MANHATTAN?  WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE DOING ALONE IN ANOTHER CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CONTINENT WITH A MAN SHE CLAIMS DRUGGED AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER A MONTH OR TWO EARLIER ?!

Is it any surprise that an attorney wouldn't take that story seriously?  What the hell was she thinking FLYING to Atlantic City to be with a man she claims drugged and sexually assaulted her in Reno AND MANHATTAN?

Why would anyone think she didn't welcome sexual advances in the scenario she gives perhaps hoping to sleep her way into show biz or just wanting to have sex with Bill Cosby?   Why would he think he needed to drug her in either Manhattan or Atlantic City?  And why would SHE HAVE NOT BEEN THE ONE TO CUT OFF CONTACT?  If it were me, I wouldn't need to be escorted back to the airport, I'd race to the police station and report I'd been drugged and raped before the crime scene could be cleaned up.   I wouldn't ever want to see him again except in court, at the defendants table IN A CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.

If she were a gay man who told me that story, I'd ask him why he was so stupid as to put himself in that situation a second time.  And by the third incident I'd be certain he was not credible.   I can promise you that the police would have never taken that story from a man seriously. Even a Warren Beatty level super-stud, straight guy who had put himself in that room in Atlantic City TO BE DRUGGED AND RAPED A THIRD TIME IN A CITY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COUNTRY would be disbelieved if he told such a tale with positive forensic evidence that penetration had occurred.

And this is cited by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon to support her contentions that Cosby is guilty of many rapes of many women going back decades, none of whom seems to have given an account which brought a prosecution on the crimes alleged.   Given whatever odds that the media scenario would generate in this, it would seem improbable that that number of allegations would not have yielded even one criminal prosecution, if not a conviction.  It's not as if "Bill Cosby" was an unknown assailant who couldn't have been positively identified.  And it's certain that there is not some unwritten law preventing even a very famous black man, even one with political power, from being prosecuted.  We just got reminded of that with the death of Marion Barry.

I'd like there to be at least one indictment, leading to a trial, leading to a conviction on ONE of these accusations against this ONE person before jumping to the conclusion that you can lay on him the collective experience of half of the human population as Mary Elizabeth Williams seems to want to do.  Not to mention the enormous online gaggle which believes it just somehow, knows what happened because they read it on some blog or comment thread.

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A media which has had any practical restraint on spreading lies removed, such as ours in the United States, by the Supreme Court, has proven to be a media which will always, always sink to the bottom to feed.  It will become a media that doesn't check its facts or even bother to collect them.  It will look at what has been typed by other "journalists" or "sources" and regurgitate that.  And, as Mary Elizabeth Williams' use of that People article to support her contentions shows, they won't even seem to bother reading what they cite, depending on their readers disinterest in bothering to check facts either.   Facts would seem to not matter much to pretty much anyone now in the new media world.

Trial by tabloid has become the law of the land and we aren't the ones who will decide who it destroys.   The left should understand that from the way that the media went after Bill Clinton, going after him in a not dissimilar way from what we are seeing in this latest sensation to rock the nation. The rule that the media can lie and spread innuendo and gossip, successfully inserting that into the collective belief of the country will not victimize the corporate elite, it will be their tool.  I can guarantee you that if Hillary Clinton decides to run, she will be the target of the very same "standards" of journalism at work this past week.

And it can target and destroy the innocent and powerless as easily as it does the rich and famous.  The activities of James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart going after public servants are the norm for a media that is given a carte blanche to lie with impunity.  As the twittersphere and those hoary old blogs have also become "media"  "social media" whatever crap generated there has also become feed for the "new media".   And, let me break this to you, the farthest of the far right and  has their social media as well, and it directly feeds the corporate media.

And the grime sweep of the new media targets even the most innocent and even admirably heroic individuals as it did Richard Jewell,  whose greatest fault was that he was overweight and out of shape.  He wasn't kewl.  Jay Leno called him "uni-doofus" and even his mother was viciously and nationally attacked. Eventually, as the real Olympics bomber was revealed to be the neo-fascist, Eric Rudolph, Jewell was entirely cleared.   Not everyone whose life is destroyed by the media acting without risk of consequences will eventually get to be exonerated.

I was introduced to this latest new media by reading Media Whores Online, which seemed to me to be written by someone who understood the media, who was appalled at how it operated and the absolutely sleazy way in which it prostituted itself to the oligarchs and plutocrats in order to destroy effective self-government and a decent society.  And, as I recall it, "The Horse" fought against that without crossing the line into spreading lies, falling into the slough of dispund that was the cabloid and hate-talk radio media that made the likes of Rush Limbaugh "the de facto leader of the Republican Party", which is probably the only truth he ever told in public.

The media we have, with the Supreme Court's permission for it to lie with impunity.  won't generate even a de facto leader of the Democratic Party, not one who is a real Democrat because lies don't serve liberal politics any more than the
truth favors Republican politics.   This new media we have, even the pantomime liberal side of it, the side which is pushing this Cosby story, will inevitably end up favoring the worst part of journalism and those served by lies and gossip.

* I will also point out that it's an assumption that those attacking Cosby haven't made, in which one untested allegation is held to support any other untested allegation, apparently even one as problematic as this one.

6 comments:

  1. This is the central problem of these cases (I'm not familiar with the details of any of them, except one other, which I'll get to): rape is non-consensual sex. The "non-consent" here is the alleged use of a drug, a detail common to many of these stories.

    But is that detail real, or is it the one everyone is using now? And how will we ever know?

    A WaPo reportert on NPR said yesterday they had investigated some of these claims and found people who corroborated the stories from the times they allegedly occurred. I presume he meant like the friend cited in this "People" account. But is that friend confirming details, or simply the general allegations? And is this friend confirming the stories completely independently, or while sitting next to their friend? Or while anticipating the phone call from the reporter?

    Without cross-examination, how do we ever know?

    The other story I know is a woman who collected money from William Morris, allegedly Cosby's agency (probably so, but again, I don't know that is true), years after the alleged rape. And then she got the money because she says Cosby had promised to take care of her, and she had been injured and needed financial help. Did she consider herself a rape victim at the time, or within the last month?

    The distinction matters.

    Rape is about to become "whenever the woman decides she didn't like it, regrets it, or thinks better of it," and without any statute of limitations on how long she can go before withdrawing consent. I've cited a case to my students of a college student drunkenly sleeping with a college friend, and regretting it the next morning, and deciding it was rape. This is, in some cases, 45 years later.

    Is this the new "social" definition of rape? Is this the final snap of the rubber band of the "Free Love" movement? I know that seems a bit of a stretch from what Cosby allegedly did (and probably did, for that matter; but it doesn't sound like rape to me, it sounds like rough sex. If I believe her account at all, beyond the fact they had sex.), but this is being stretched into "FINALLY WOMEN ARE NOT AFRAID!"

    I'm beginning to wonder if men should be. This stuff tends to trickle down.....

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  2. In one of the other stories I read the woman alleged that he gave her two over the counter cold pills, I'm assuming containing benadryl as the other cold pills I'm familiar with make you jumpy instead of sleepy. I've got long experience with taking benadryl for my epic allergies, having, on a couple of occasions, taking more than the recommended dose of two tablets. They made me very sleepy but I wasn't ga-ga and would be able to remember if someone raped me.

    I wish I could say I was surprised that even that protogee of "The Horse" Atrios was sinking to cabloid levels on this story, following where his wretched comment community was leading, but I've had enough experience with the "new media" to be surprised.

    That post-facto removal of consent was the most astonishing thing I learned about while researching the accusation PZ Myer made against Michael Shirmer. I posted an account from an aspiring "ethicist" about how she and her boy friend, both drunk, had consensual sex and she decided several days later that she really didn't mean it and she was drunk and so she'd been raped. My question is why he hadn't been raped. Which is another thing about this, it seems to be very important to so many discussing this to ignore that men can be raped and, in fact, are raped. I would suspect, given the stigma on being gay as well as a "weak man" that it is less reported than rapes of women. A lot can be learned about this issue by considering the experience of men who are raped or who merely got drunk and made a fool of themselves sexually.

    The only solution I can see is for every, single act of penetration to be preceded by a written, signed, witnessed contract. That's apparently the only level of defense against these charges that might be accepted as, maybe, proving innocence.

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  3. I associate Andrea Dworkin with the idea that "all sex is rape." It was a notion (perhaps not hers) that was roundly derided when it was first formulated; but I think it's making a comeback.

    And even before I post I remember it wasn't hers, it was the idea of a very radical feminist whose name now escapes me. But the idea that women must be listened to no matter what they say or when they say it because "women" (always a completely different set of women) were not "listened to" back in some mythical past and so we are merely righting a wrong done way back when, is a pernicious one.

    It's akin to saying we must punish whites today for slavery 150 years ago. I'm not even against the idea of reparations (although that's never going to happen), but that's the pushback to the civil rights struggle: that now whites are being punished by favoritism, or something, to blacks. It's the inverse play, but the same rationale: women were "not believed" when it came to sex crime allegations, so now they must be super-believed in order to balance the scales of justice.

    No matter who we balance those scales on, or how.

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  4. Ti-Grace Atkinson?

    It's not going to happen, that post-facto removal of consent stuff, it's not going to do anything but discredit the definition of rape and consent. Given that women can't even achieve pay equity and an Equal Rights Amendment, this fad will end up backfiring on women.

    As I said days ago, I'm not a Bill Cosby fan, I didn't like his stuff from the time my sister played his first album in my presence back in the 60s (I never got the point of comedy albums, it was like serving frozen scrambled eggs to me. Some things have to be live and fresh.) I wouldn't be at all surprised if he acted like a cad, it's a frequently encountered thing with rich, mega-stars. And I wouldn't be surprised if lots of hangers on and groupies didn't try to sleep with him to become a player. But when there's an allegation of a felony, the rules for judging that change, completely.

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    1. On second thought, that sounds like something Robin Morgan would have said. She's a kind of medium small fish in the anti-religion industry now, I believe.

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  5. I want to say Catherine McKinnison(?). Something like that. Very extreme, with ideas even other extreme feminists didn't cotton to.

    But memory fails me, so I can't be sure.

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