Before I went to bed on Tuesday night, the various new outlets were reporting that later on Tuesday (in America) that Donald Trump would be brought before the Supreme Court of New York State to have the 34 various charges read against him. This is where the meta-story gets interesting.
Sky News Australia breathlessly reported that Donald Trump was going to be arrested. Sky News Australia which doesn't have original thoughts of its own, as far as I can tell exists for a purely American audience via its YouTube channel, for the sole purpose of adding legitimacy to the existing narrative of Fox News, through the mechanism of being exotic. Fox News in America was also trumpeting that Donald Trump was going to be arrested. Nine Entertainment Co. through Nine Network and the newspapers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were also reporting that Donald Trump was going to be arrested.
However, NPR, the BBC, Politico, the ABC, DW and NHK were all reporting correctly that Donald Trump was going to be arraigned. Now before you accuse me of 'liberal bias', the news feed that I saw on NPR's Twitter account yesterday morning (Wednesday), showed Donald Trump walking into the courtroom as free as a bird. What's going on here? Does reality have a 'liberal bias' or could it be that Sky News Australia and Fox News were deliberately lying to their audience for the purposes of creating a narrative going forward? The truth is that word mean things and that Donald Trump was arraigned and not arrested.
An 'arraignment' is when the accused has the list of charges against them read to them, so that they might be able to mount some kind of future defence. An 'arrest' is when the accused is physically taken into custody and held and then has the list of charges against them read to them. The nature of the charges against Donald Trump is such that he was never going to be arrested but rather arraigned. Arrest warrants almost without exception, are written against people who pose a physical threat to other people, either because of a history of violence and/or criminal damage and Donald Trump has as far as I can tell, no history of that at all. Arrest warrants might be written against people, where because of the nature of their enemies, a physical threat is posed to them. Now given that the failure rate of US Presidents due to fast moving bullets is 11.25%, then the physical threat posed to Donald Trump is non-zero but it is not that much higher than the threat to the general populace because of the United States' dangerously stupid gun laws.
Arraignments on the other hand, are read to people in courts because the state thinks that it has some kind of criminal case to be prosecuted. The most common arraignments that happen are drink driving charges, where the accused has been charged, and is generally very compliant with police. In such criminal cases, the accused is generally quite remorseful and ashamed and is staring headlong into the void of what they think is a very dark future. They pose little to no threat of physical violence or damage to persons and property. I can also tell you that many Arraignments are read to people in courts in absentia, where the person has committed some kind of non-physical crime and would rather take the transcript of charges away for analysis later. Justice might very well be blind but she doesn't actually care if the accused is in the room where it happens or not. Justice who comes with the set of balances will weigh up the cases and will strike judgement with her sword in due time, whether or not the accused is there.
So knowing that Donald Trump was going to be arraigned and not arrested, why report that he was going to be arrested? Because if you are Sky News Australia or Fox News, you can then paint Donald Trump as some kind of falsely accused hero; which fits in nicely with your general attack at a supposedly corrupt court system and a supposedly corrupt media. "Look at us. We are the sole purveyors of truth. Do not believe the others. They are false prophets!".
The unwritten truth is that the prosecution wouldn't have even attempted to arrange Donald Trump unless they knew that there was a good to excellent chance that they could prove the charges. The evidence is must be very very strong, or else D.A. Alvin Bragg wouldn't have pressed charges.
Still, the fact that Sky News Australia and presumably Fox News would use the word 'arrest' instead of 'arraignment', which is functionally a lie, either indicates that they want to spin this coin at some point in the future or they that genuinely think that Donald Trump is sunk.
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