Last week, Fox News was the only major outlet not to air the primetime hearing hosted by the House committee investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. But for the committee’s daytime session on Monday, Fox plans to join the rest of the pack.
Fox officials are apparently justifying the switch by saying that prime time is for opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson, who rejected live coverage of Thursday evening’s hearing, CNN reported. Daytime, however, is for news, opening the door for Fox to televise Monday’s session live at 10am ET.
The decision by the conservative-leaning network to air the hearing comes amid a discernible split between the network’s news and commentary broadcasts about the meaning of what happened last week and the value of what’s in store.
News anchor Bret Baier said Donald Trump looked “really bad” in a video presentation shown at Thursday’s January 6 primetime session
“The focus seems to be the target of President Donald Trump, and he looks really bad in this presentation,” Baier said. “He’s just watching the TVs and kind of applauding what’s happening.”
Baier also noted that the video of Trump’s speech was cut off before he told the crowd to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.
At the same time, Fox News’ more politically attuned hosts have continued to disparage the hearings. Host Mark Levin described hearings as a “sham” over the weekend.
“This will go down in history as a dark mark on the American political system,” Levin said, adding: “It’s an abomination to the American system, not just of justice but our congressional and representative system.”
During Thursday’s hearings, host Tucker Carlson broadcast an hour-long, commercial-free discussion of alternative interpretations of the deadly riot, including that it had been instigated by FBI agents.
“It tells you a lot about the priorities of our ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6 tonight – from our moral inferiors, no less,” Carlson said.
“They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it,” he added.
In Monday’s session, the second of six scheduled public hearings, the committee chair, Bennie Thompson, will lead a more traditional congressional hearing that will highlight the origins of the “big lie” – Trump’s claims that the election he lost to Joe Biden had been rigged – and how that claim was propagated between 4 November 2020 and 6 January, when Congress moved to certify the election results.
The committee will seek to highlight evidence that the Trump campaign and the Republican party sought funds from supporters to bolster their claim and then inundated them with messages to reinforce it.
“Some of those individuals … echoed those very same lies the former president peddled in the run-up to the insurrection,” a select committee aide said on Sunday evening.
Those preparations, coupled with an effort to question the integrity of mail-in voting and attempts to pressure state legislators to appoint pro-Trump electors, were made alongside intensifying claims by Trump that he had actually won the election.
The committee will hear from Chris Stirewalt, Fox News’ former political editor, who was part of the team to make the network’s decision to call Arizona for Biden.
It was supposed to also hear from Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, but his appearance was canceled because his wife was reportedly in labor.
Stepien “was present for key conversations about what the data showed about Mr Trump’s chances of succeeding in an effort to win swing states, beginning on election night”, according to the New York Times.
A second panel features Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who helped orchestrate the Republican recount strategy in Florida after the 2000 election; BJ Pak, a former US attorney based in north Georgia pressured by Trump to establish election fraud claims; and Al Schmidt, a city commissioner in Philadelphia.
“We’re going to hear testimony from government officials who were the ones who looked for the fraud, and about how the effort to uncover these baseless allegations bore no fruit,” a committee aide said on Sunday night. “Simply, the fraud that they were looking for didn’t exist.”
Note: This post was updated to include to clarify the summary of CNN’s reporting that Fox considers prime time to be for opinion hosts.
