The Most Important Story From The January 6 Hearings

As anyone with a TV or newspaper well knows, the news media have relentlessly pounded us with coverage of the January 6 Congressional hearings. ABC Nightly News has at times devoted almost a third of their airtime to reportage from the Capitol, complete with Jon Karl shamelessly plugging his book while ostensibly pretending to be a man on the scene reporter (“As I write in my book, Betrayal…”). Every major TV network but Fox carved out blocks of their prime-time space in an attempt to recapture the glory of the Watergate years. And, of course, the cable news networks are in a lather.

What happened on January 6 was indeed big news. It was very ugly. It was also a futile gesture. And it handed the Democrats – the very people many storming the Capitol believed to have illegitimately attained power through ballot box chicanery – talking points to carry them right through to the midterms. Anyone thinking rationally that day should have seen it. But, from Donald Trump on down, we see that rationality gave way to raw emotion and a frustration that stemmed from utter disbelief that over 81 million could cast their ballot for an uninspiring, corrupt septuagenarian, who is the consummate DC insider. Not to mention a candidate so obviously mentally enfeebled that he was relegated to meticulously choreographed Q&A sessions from his basement with journalists so overtly biased they may as well have been on the DNC payroll. And who knows, maybe they were?

And that last observation presents us with the bigger story of the riots. There are questions looming above the January 6 events that are more salient than the information being gathered in the hearings. They have to do with vital American institutions themselves. First and foremost, the press. No republic like ours can last without a diligent media questioning authority and keeping them at bay; human nature will always gravitate towards the accumulation of power if left unchecked. The Framers understood this. And yet the difference in coverage between the four-hour January 6 riots and those that occurred throughout the nation during the year preceding these events is telling, and disturbing for those who believe in the vital necessity of the Fourth Estate.

In 2020 over 200 cities were the scenes of riotous behavior, looting, vandalism and arson. Over two dozen innocents like Italia Kelly and David Dorn were murdered in cold blood. Police headquarters as well as businesses were set ablaze. Some 1,000 police officers were assaulted, and roughly $2 billion in property damage occurred, mostly in minority neighborhoods.

And yet, the same media that seems so hellbent to crucify the man who took a selfie in Pelosi’s office performed rhetorical yoga that would make a swami wince when reporting the stories of the mass lawlessness across the country – some of it literally going on right behind the very reporters who with a straight face called them, and this is my favorite from CNN, “fiery but mostly peaceful protests.” Sure, and but for that unfortunate Booth-Lincoln incident, all-in-all the night out at Ford’s Theater was pretty fun.

Publications like the Washington Post went out of their way to declare that the protests were “overwhelmingly non-violent.” That only seven percent of the estimated 15 to 26 million people who hit the streets engaged in rank criminality. So that means only between a mere one and two million torched and ransacked their own cities?  Well, that’s a relief. Yet, were one to use these same soothing parameters as a measure of the “peacefulness” of the January 6 gathering, what percent of the estimated 120,000 who marched in D.C. to protest what they believed to be a fraudulent election actually stormed the Capitol? As of this writing, 884 have been arrested and charged.

I’m no math wizard, but that means of the 120,000 in D.C. that day, it wasn’t seven percent who were lawless, but rather seven-tenths of one percent. Bump it up to an estimated 2,000 who actually stormed the Capitol itself. That’s one-and-a-half percent. Yet, the media was loath to call it an “overwhelmingly peaceful” protest. Why? Because this doesn’t suit the narrative the Democrats wish to impose upon the country through their reliable conduits in the newsroom.

Such obvious water-carrying for one party might be behind a new Gallup poll showing Americans’ trust in the news media is at an all-time low. Of self-identified Republicans, only five percent trust newspapers and eight percent trust TV news. This is to be somewhat expected as conservatives have for decades had to wade through the now flagrant but always present left-wing bias in the newsrooms. But more tellingly, of Democrats, only 35% trust newspapers and a mere 20% trust TV news. Even they get it.

This collapse in media trust, and the broader erosion of journalistic standards of objectivity