What does Kevin McCarthy think he’s playing at? The House speaker has given Fox News polemicist Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of U.S. Capitol security footage during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. To anyone who believes in honest transparency and the safe functioning of our legislative branch, the special handoff is as rotten as old garbage.
The principles here are elementary: Where and when CCTV images are fit for public dissemination, they should be broadly released, not sent to a single right-wing ax-grinder who for more than two years now has been minimizing the criminal attempt to disrupt the Electoral College count and spreading fever-dream conspiracy theories. In reports set to air this week, Carlson will cherry-pick from the material to serve his own narrative — a power that will be denied the rest of us, who haven’t been granted insider access to what is a definitive series of snapshots of seminal events in recent American history.
Several other TV networks, newspapers and The Associated Press have asked McCarthy for the same video and the speaker has no right to say no.
