Rare coverage of high criminal court races comes from blog, not MSM

The MSM has all but completely ignored the races for Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, but thankfully Bob Mabry at the blog Courts and Writing has synopses of the Republican primary candidates, which are frankly the only ones that matter. See his writeups of candidates running for:

• Place 3
• Place 4, and
• Place 9

The latter two items are more substantive. Mabry also has posted brief writeups of several races for various Court of Appeals in Southeast Texas:

• Fourteenth,
• First,
• Ninth

I must say, given that crime coverage is such a staple of every daily newspaper and TV news broadcast in the state, Grits doesn't understand why these Court of Criminal Appeals races have been all but completely ignored by the press. (The Longview News-Journal started running profiles of the CCA candidates, then stopped before finishing the job.) The MSM seems transfixed on the most salacious details of a handful of cherry-picked individual cases - usually chosen for their shock value rather than their societal import - but pays almost no attention to Texas' high criminal court, even when their rulings affect thousands of cases or degrade constitutional rights. And nobody in the press seems to care about vetting candidates for that body, even in a year when there are three open seats for the first time in recent memory.

It's difficult to make sense of that dynamic without viewing the media's crime coverage through an incredibly cynical lens. I try to give my reporter-friends the benefit of the doubt, but there are days when they don't make it easy.

RELATED: Dearth of small-government candidates in Court of Criminal Appeals races, and High-court watching: When the right-hand shoulder becomes the middle of the road.