Jan. 6 panel seeks to break through with prime-time programming
by Rebecca Beitsch - 06/06/22 5:25 AM ET
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is preparing for a crucial week as it prepares to finally share with the public the fruits of its months-long investigation into the riot in prime time on Thursday.
The 8 p.m. hearing kicking off a series of meetings shows the committee is eager to reach a broad segment of Americans and relay the extent to which democracy itself was at stake that day.
“The goal here is to construct this narrative,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies with Brookings.
“What they want to do is go through the countless depositions that they’ve taken and other evidence that they gathered and figure out a way to try and convey a story to the public.”
The challenge is making a captivating case for a wide audience, particularly those who feel they already know what happened that day or who are ready to move on from the attack.
According to polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the country is nearly evenly divided on how much it wants to reflect on the day.
While 52 percent said it’s important to learn more about what happened, 48 percent said it was “time to move on.” The divide is almost entirely partisan.
“I do think that the committee will have difficulties in communicating messages because of the kind of segregated information environment in which a lot of the American public exists,” Ryan Goodman, co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, told The Hill.
“That said, I do think the visual of a solemn public hearing and live testimony plus, in all likelihood video material, could focus attention in a way [for] the members of the American public are otherwise not thinking about these issues.”
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https://thehill.com/news/house/3511389-jan-6-panel-seeks-to-break-through-with-primetime-programming/
