By Todd Lassa
Last Thursday’s prime time House Select committee hearing on the January 6 Capitol insurrection finally was too much for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. In case you missed it, Friday evening The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board ran an opinion piece entitled “The President Who Stood Still on Jan. 6.”
“Shortly after Mr. Trump urged protesters to march on the Capitol, he was told violence was breaking out," the WSJ noted. "At about 1:30 p.m. he went to the dining room, where he stayed until 4 p.m. There is no official record of what he did, and the photographer was told no pictures. …
“All of MAGA world was texting Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Mr. Trump needed to call off his supporters. …” (Including Murdoch's own Fox News pundits Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.)
On NPR’s Weekend Edition media correspondent David Folkenflik suggested the editorial would give the WSJ’s traditional readership cover to move back to more traditional anti-regulatory conservatism. Murdoch’s flip on Trump will affect coverage on Fox News as well, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will get more positive coverage, though its prime-time pundit “personalities,” including Ingraham, Hannity and Tucker Carlson, may stick with Trump.
There is no sign extreme-right media outlets as One America News will back off support of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election results. But Murdoch’s flip includes his working-class daily newspaper, the New York Post, which last Friday ran an “opinion/editorial” entitled, “Trump’s silence on Jan. 6 is damning.”
The upshot is Murdoch’s media outlets give the majority of Republicans – who have consistently polled that a majority of them believe Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020 – cover to finally move on. Traditional Republicans have been trying to do this since at least Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s February 13, 2021 speech blaming the former president for the Capitol attack, after voting against convicting him for it. The 1/6 committee replayed part of McConnell’s speech last Thursday night.
Since then, pundits have kept their licked fingers poked into the political winds to measure Trump’s ups and downs, and each time he looked to be out, he bounced back on the strength of his minority, hardcore base. If the extreme-MAGA outlets like OAN refuse to budge it would be reasonable to expect somewhere less than 30% of voters (his lowest approval rating was 29% when he left office, according to Breitbart, quoting a Pew Research poll at the time) will continue to back the Big Lie. But the 1/6 hearings may have proved too provocative and too water-tight since they began in June, even if most Republicans claim to be ignoring them. Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) co-leadership of the committee, and her sober warnings of the Big Lie’s threat to our democracy appears to have sunk in.
Perhaps if the 1/6 panel holds more hearings beginning in September, they finally will be covered live on Fox News?
(MON 7/25/22)
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Reactions to the 1/6 Hearings Season Finale (SUN-MON 7/24-25/22)
By Todd Lassa
We are headed for a civil war, said 50.1% of respondents to a poll released before Thursday’s eighth hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. To be precise, this slight majority of 8,620 respondents “at least somewhat agree” a civil war will happen soon, The Hill reported Saturday, after that season finale.
UC-Davis researchers took the poll May 13 to June 2, ending a full week before the premier of the 1/6 hearings, and found that 47.8% “strongly disagree” a civil war is in our near-future. As with most such surveys, the poll breaks “agree” and “disagree” down, with 14% “strongly” or “very strongly” agreeing such a war is imminent, and 36% somewhat disagreeing. The good news, if it can be called such, is that two-thirds said a civil war would be a serious threat to democracy, and 90% say it’s “very” or “extremely” important for the U.S. to remain a democracy.
Perhaps the most startling warning about the future of our democracy comes from this: 40% said having a “strong leader” is more important for the United States than democracy. Two-fifths of respondents are OK with authoritarianism. Cue the old warnings that the January 6 insurrection was a “dress rehearsal” for the 2024 presidential election.
On Friday, The Hustings launched a Twitter poll [@NewsHustings] asking whether you agree, or disagree with Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) statement from Thursday’s hearing that Donald J. Trump “should never be trusted with any position of authority ever again.” No “strongly agree” or “somewhat disagree” gray areas here – just “yes” or “no.”
To be clear, this is not a scientific poll like the one conducted by UC-Davis, but a simple reader poll asking anyone with enough interest in the subject to reply.
At the conclusion of the poll Saturday, of 810 respondents 76.4% agree with Cheney that Trump should never be allowed near a position of authority, which means that 23.6% said he should.
Currently in the left column you’ll find an opinion piece by another of our contributing pundits, Jim McCraw, on 1/6 Hearing VIII, followed by tweeted comments on our Twitter poll. Comments in opposition to Cheney’s statement are in the right column.
Scroll down one file to find our original coverage and analysis of last Thursday’s prime time hearing in the center column with Ken Zino’s commentary in the left column and Stephen Macaulay’s (our never-Trumper conservative-leaning pundit-at-large) in the right column.
Submit your opinions in any of the comment boxes on this page, or email editors@thehustings.news.