Jan. 6 TV Hearings Grab ‘em by the Eyeballs

By J. Max Robins, June 16, 2022

Kudos are due to the mastermind politicians and producers of the first two episodes of some riveting television: “The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.” The hearings have exposed a wide chasm in the Republican Party, and dealt some hard body blows to that once-undisputed heavyweight GOP champ, Donald Trump.

Speaking of punchy goons, extremely savvy was the decision to portray the defeated president with stark realism, in the vein of Brendan Gleeson’s menacing mob boss from the 2020 drama The Comey Rule, rather than the buffoonish Alec Baldwin Saturday Night Live iteration. In the current hearings, Trump is well depicted as the criminally narcissistic leader of the insurrection. Plus, certainly knowing he’d lost to Joe Biden, then proceeding to line his pockets with hundreds of millions of donor dollars, spread ridiculous doubt and keep his name klieg-light bright, speaks to a perfectly Trumpian art of the steal. As the 45th President of the United States once intoned, with a predator’s resolve, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Jumping on the Bandwagon

The hearings built on a steady anti-Trump drumbeat from the Right, where a growing number of fellow travelers had grown weary of his trigger-happy behavior. Late in May, The Wall Street Journal’s resident op-ed influencer and observer of the obvious, Peggy Noonan, noted that “something is shifting” in the GOP, and that many who backed Trump don’t follow his lead or want him to run for the White House again. Moving further Right, publications such as the Washington Examiner, Townhall and American Thinker dared question the wisdom of his dominant position as the party’s presumptive 2024 presidential candidate.

That’s not all. In the wake of the first two hearing episodes, other, heavier hitters normally in his corner also ran editorials suggesting Americans cancel “The Trump Show” The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post showed a late-to-the-game rare moment of editorial sanity by condemning Trump for his Jan. 6 pleasure at the insurrectionists’ “string up Mike Pence” cry. Post columnist Michael Goodwin, who is loath to criticize any popular conservative voice, noted Trump was still “a huge power in the GOP,” but that he wasn’t positioned to give the “hope and confidence America desperately needed” in the 2024 White House race. In The Journal, Murdoch’s even more vital megaphone, a June 11 editorial pinned responsibility for the insurrection squarely on Trump.

Murdoch’s most influential platform, Fox News, was alone among major TV information outfits not to go live with the debut of the Jan. 6 hearings. Instead, the network’s primetime troika of insurrection deniers—Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham—preached as usual to their minions, although during Carlson and Hannity it was sans commercials, presumably so viewers wouldn’t surf over to watch what they were braying against. Fox News did finally go live with Monday’s daytime second installment of the Jan. 6 hearings, presumably to bolster the fading image that the network is about real news during the day up to the cocktail hour gaggle “The Five,”  and only unfair and unbalanced afterward into primetime.

A Surprise Hit in the Making?

Even if it wasn’t enough to lure in Fox News that first night, bringing in ex-ABC News president James Goldston to produce the hearings miniseries, and having Liz Cheney co-anchor the opening primetime segment, added to the do-or-die drama, bringing into focus how the basic tenets of our democracy were (and are) under assault. The first two episodes opened strong with a cumulative audience of more than 30 million. That number doesn’t include the millions more who listened on NPR, read about it or scanned the highlights. Watching former sycophants and enablers turn against Trump, such as ex-attorney general Bill Barr and first daughter Ivanka Trump, certainly was some “Must-See-TV.”

Still, I have no illusions. Even with such a strong opening, the possibility that the six-part televised investigation leads to a criminal indictment of 2020’s Biggest Loser in Chief and magically turns voter sentiment toward Democrats in the upcoming midterm election, seems at best a Leprechaun longshot. Yet I am also enough of a TV historian, and believer in the medium’s power, to know that it’s often the late-spring—think Survivor, American Idoland, most importantly, the Watergate Hearings—when a surprise hit emerges and turns fortunes around. And the air, both here and in Washington, is getting hotter by the day.

J. Max Robins (@jmaxrobins) is  executive director of the Center for Communication. The former editor-in-chief of Broadcasting & Cable, he has contributed to publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review and Forbes. 

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