Mainstream media coverage of the January 6 committee is a gift to Fox News

If mainstream media outlets need a lesson in the danger their coverage of the January 6 select committee presents, they need only look at how the biggest right-wing media voices are going to exploit what they say.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected two out of the five members that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had offered to sit on the committee — Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN) — over comments they had made openly disparaging the investigation as simply an attack on former President Donald Trump and millions of his supporters. McCarthy then withdrew his other three remaining nominees, insisting that Pelosi seat Jordan and Banks.

Mainstream media coverage has focused more on Pelosi’s rejection of those members than the entire pattern of Republican obstruction against any investigation of the attack on the Capitol. And now it’s fallen into the hands of Fox News, which has beaten the drums against any investigation of January 6.

On Thursday’s edition of The Faulkner Focus, news anchor Harris Faulkner declared that “now even some in the media are going after Pelosi’s decision,” displaying tweets from prominent voices at both Politico and CNN saying that Pelosi’s action was “a gift to Kevin McCarthy in the long run” and that it had “doomed the already tiny chances of the 1/6 committee actually mattering,” respectively.

Along with the tweets, Faulkner prominently displayed their companies’ corporate logos.

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Citation

From the July 22, 2021, edition of Fox News’ The Faulkner Focus

Later, during a quick news update on Outnumbered, Faulkner repeated the talking point about the committee: “Remember, just today alone, we’ve seen journalists and editorialists from Politico and CNN talking about, well, that may take a jab at this commission by Nancy Pelosi even mattering if there are no Republicans on it.”

But in saying, from her position as a news anchor, that there were “no Republicans” on the committee, Faulkner seemingly erased the existence of the committee’s currently lone Republican member, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has castigated McCarthy for his efforts to undermine any probe of the insurrection.