Once you got around to the point where the January 6 Committee was meeting, Fox wouldn’t air the hearings. Instead, they would have Tucker Carlson, who really led this effort, do his regular show and explain how there was no reason to pay attention to any of this, and it was all a lie. The counternarrative that they, mainly Tucker Carlson with the help of some fringier figures that he helped pull into the mainstream, concocted was that the whole thing had been a setup; that the FBI had basically created the whole situation; that no one had weapons, no one was hurt, everything was fine; and that these prosecutors went after the January Sixers just like they want to go after you.
They turned it into a culture-war issue. They turned it into a situation where the January Sixers were on your side, and the federal government was not. And that, over time, as Donald Trump came back into the limelight, came back up the rungs of the Republican Party back to the nomination, became the dominant narrative on the right. And now, you have situations where members of Congress are going on CNN trying to make these claims and seeing them fall flat on the space.
Sargent: Another thing that’s really jarring about this interview, and what you just said gets at this as well, is that there’s so much euphemism in the mainstream media on the subject of January 6, on the subject of Trump’s support for the rioters, on the subject of what Trump actually did to try to overthrow the government with mob violence. There’s this unbalanced situation where the euphemism that prevails in mainstream discourse is almost outweighed by this “Death Star” on the right, this black hole of lies and disinformation about that event. And it exerts this weird gravitational pull on the mainstream media and keeps it in the realm of euphemism and bothsidesism. Can you talk about that dynamic? It’s a major problem, right? You just don’t have blunt, clear talk like that from Acosta in the MSN. And that, in combination with the Death Star of Fox News, creates a highly unbalanced media ecosystem, right?
