The January 6 ‘Blockbuster’ Hearings

H ere’s Axios’s Mike Allen with what he breathlessly terms a “scoop”: “I’m told Goldston is busily producing Thursday’s 8 p.m. ET hearing as if it were a blockbuster investigative special.”

Oh? James Goldston, former ABC News president and “a master documentary storyteller,” according to Allen, is “a renowned former network-news executive” who is working for the Democrats to “hone a mountain of explosive material into a captivating multimedia presentation for a prime-time hearing Thursday” in yet another attempt to restore the events of January 6, 2021, to the front of the national attention.

In case you were wondering whether what the Democrats are offering tomorrow is merely a television program airing for partisan purposes — the proper name for these things is an infomercial — Axios has made the answer abundantly clear. The Capitol riot may be important, and Democrats may be justified in using it to make a political point about Republicans, but that doesn’t mean referring back to the shameful event constitutes news. Barring important new developments, the rioting is already priced into the assessments that midterm voters are making.

Will this alleged “blockbuster” really deliver? Morbius was supposed to be a blockbuster, too, and it had flying vampires. Even after becoming the kind of social-media sensation the Democrats can only dream of creating, it didn’t grab ticket buyers. Just because something airs in prime time, or comes with a colossal marketing effort, doesn’t mean anyone will actually watch. Moreover, the events of January 6, 2021, were abundantly well reported at the time and in the weeks thereafter. As the supposed “investigation” enters its 18th month with no apparent intention of ever wrapping up, the pertinent facts have been known for some time. Repackaging previously published information doesn’t ordinarily make for much of a show.

Which means the Democrats’ blockbuster looks more like a summer rerun. Ratings figure to be abysmal, and the audience to be limited to the sorts of strange political obsessives who say, “Honey, it’s Thursday night, it’s summer, what could be nicer than to watch a congressional hearing and chill?” Besides, the news channel that is, by a wide margin, the most-watched one in the United States is not covering the hearings live, probably because Fox News Channel is aware that the Democratic Party infomercial is a Democratic Party infomercial. (Sorry, “captivating multimedia presentation” staged by Democrats.) If the Democratic Party wishes to buy air time on its prime-time competitor, Tucker Carlson’s show, I’m sure that can be negotiated, 30 seconds at a time.

Old news isn’t. Yet CNN, inter alia, is hyping the prime-time special as though it’s a major event. Sadly for it, new boss Chris Licht is steering a completely new course compared with his Chicken Little predecessor Jeff Zucker: “We are truth-tellers, focused on informing, not alarming our viewers,” he has told employees, according to another Axios report, and has said that “if talent cannot adjust to a less partisan tone and strategy, they could be ousted.” Axios specifically cited Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter as two notably partisan personalities who seem at odds with any conception of CNN as existing even in the same hemisphere with an ideal of neutrality.

If Democrats were actually serious about the events of 1/6/21, they would fix the genuinely disturbing underlying issue, which is the ambiguity of the Electoral Count Act. Instead of doing their job and legislating a fix to protect future elections, though, the politicians are simply leaning on the propagandists to protect their own jobs.

Nobody is actually taking these hearings seriously. The Right obviously isn’t:

As for the Left, it is not treating the hearing as an important means to uncover new information, but rather as a made-for-TV gambit to change the subject away from the many crises associated with Biden administration incompetence. Voters haven’t been thinking about the Capitol riots much because those riots lasted six hours and are over, whereas inflation is ongoing and issues a fresh insult to the wallet every day.

Like Joe Biden, the Democrats think that simply continuing to do things that are not resonating with voters will miraculously steer them away from the election cliff toward which they are heading. They’d be wiser to actually change their terrible policies. But if Democrats had wise ones, they would not be Democrats.