The Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC will be the site of a committee hearing to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Brendan SMIALOWSKI of Agence France-Presse takes a photo.
19 million Americans watched live coverage of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol across six broadcast and cable news networks. More data will be released later in the day, which will likely lead to a rise in the numbers.
Fox Business took second place with 2.957 million viewers between 8 and 10 p.m., falling from its usual perch as the highest-rated network in cable news. MSNBC had 4.2 million viewers. CNN had an average audience of 2.6 million people.
ABC had over five million viewers. NBC had 3.5 million viewers while CBS had 3.3 million. The Fox Business Network had 223,000 viewers between 8 and 10 pm.
The committee's hearing was carried live on all the major broadcast and cable news networks, with the exception of Fox News Channel. The two-hour hearing featured testimony from a police officer injured as she tried to stop the angry mob from breaching police barricades. There was a dramatic 12-minute video featuring never-before-seen footage from security cameras inside and outside the Capitol, and body cameras worn by officers who fought to defend the building.
After the video was played, the committee took a ten-minute break to understand how the news networks would react to it. Each network was given a chance to comment on what they had just seen. Jake Tapper said that the film was an absolutely devastating one.
There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your Republican colleagues are still defending the indefensible.
Steele said that the definition of a mic drop was what you wanted.
The Cannon House Office Building is where the US Capitol is located in Washington, DC. The photo was taken by MANDEL NGAN/POOL/ Agence France-Presse.
Tucker Carlson opened his program by dismissing the live hearings underway in Washington as a lecture about January 6, which he described as a forgettably minor outbreak of mob violence. The whole thing is insult, in fact, it's deranged, said Carlson. We are not playing with one another.
Laura Ingraham said that Democrats and liberals have been flopping in prime time for a long time. Is it always the same? It tries to connect the dots that never pay off. There was a drumbeat of demonization. It isn't entertaining or edifying. It's not good programing.
Fox did carry the hearings live on its sister network, Fox Business, but the decision to skip live coverage created an alternate reality to a hearing that showed vivid and bloody detail of a national crisis.
US Representative Liz Cheney and US Representative Bennie Thompson are standing together. The photo was taken by MANDEL NGAN/Agence France-Presse.
Folkenflik wrote that Fox News avoided broadcasting "flat contradictions of what many leading Fox News personalities have told their audiences in the past year and a half."
The networks were presented with a question: would the committee present information that justified wall-to-wall coverage? Tom Bettag, a former executive producer of ABC's Nightline and lecturer at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said that getting prime-time coverage is a truly extraordinary statement. The committee would have to show the networks that they are presenting things that people don't know about.
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