The Jan. 6 hearing was everything it had to be, The New Abnormal co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy agreed—and Republicans knew it. Liz Cheney, said Molly, in a conversation recorded just after the primetime hearing ended, “is an extremely good speaker you can tell will follow Donald J. Trump to the gates of Hell.” So as the damning case was laid out, the MAGA set did their best to pretend it simply wasn’t happening.
Tucker Carlson went commercial-free on Fox News to try and counter-program and keep viewers from seeing the actual hearing that aired, complete with disturbing new footage of the attack on the capital, on every other news channel because Republicans know that “this is indefensible,” said Molly. “It’s like the gun violence stuff. They can’t win. So they’re just trying to run down the clock. They know it’s a loser for them.
“They know just like they did after the Trump election that they will lose their audience if they tell the truth. And that's what we saw after the election. They were not going to do the Big Lie and their rating started to go down. And there was a conscious moment where Fox decided they would in fact do the Big Lie because that’s what their people wanted… they know that this is the way they keep their audience.”
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“It’s cowardice, it’s rank cowardice all the way up the chain at Fox News,” says Andy, a veteran of Fox News. “Whether it’s the people like Tucker Carlson or whether it’s Suzanne Scott in the executive suite or quite frankly whether it’s the Murdochs—it’s just a fear that their listeners might actually hear something that goes against the narrative that they put out there 24/7, 365. And they are so afraid of that..
Plus: Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer talks about “why Democrats keep losing the messaging war,” his new book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America and the “decades-long billionaire-funded plan to build up an alternate information bubble,” and Ian Bremmer, author of The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World explains that there are four now: the pandemic, global climate change, “the proliferation of disruptive and dangerous technologies, and now you have the Russians invading Ukraine and a war in Europe.”
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