Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt confesses that he won’t talk about January 6 out of fear of losing his audience

Hewitt accidentally reveals why right-wing media can never take a stand against the insurrectionists in their movement

Written by Eric Kleefeld

Published

Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt made a key admission on Monday’s edition of his talk radio show, about why he opposes the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Hewitt spoke on his show with Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, estranged Trump ally, and current ABC News contributor, during which the two vociferously attacked the committee — even as the two men both demonstrated that they knew serious crimes took place, amidst then-President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Christie bemoaned, however, that media outlets allegedly cover it because it was “harmful to Republicans.”

“And I never talk about January 6th,” Hewitt answered, “because I like my audience, I don’t want them to turn me off. And they’re bored, they do not like it.”

The lesson here is that nobody should have expected the events of a year ago to bring about a more moderate conservatism — the elusive predictions that “the fever will break” — after all, conservatism has since done the opposite. Conservative media voices can’t stand up against either the violence of January 6, 2021, or the overarching plot to overturn American democracy, because their audiences fundamentally don’t like to hear such denunciations. And if any conservative hosts were to take such a line, their fans would just go somewhere else.

Instead, the actual profit motive for the industry is in fanning those flames and deflecting blame, or at least in Hewitt’s case by opposing any efforts to combat them.

From the February 7, 2022, edition of Salem Radio Network’s The Hugh Hewitt Show

HUGH HEWITT (HOST): So Governor, I want to go to the RNC. Everybody in elite media, Manhattan-Beltway media especially, focused on the censure of Liz Cheney, my friend, and Adam Kinzinger. And they missed entirely the real big deal, which is they adopted a rule saying we’re not working with the Presidential Debate Commission. I can pretty much guarantee you that that’s an issue, and that Liz and Adam are not going to be an issue in the fall of ’22 and in 2024. Why doesn’t legacy media cover the big deal, and they only focus on the [1/6] Select Committee, which is actually illegitimate, in my view?

CHRIS CHRISTIE (ABC NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Hugh, I have strong feelings about that, I’ve said them publicly, I said it again today on your show. But enough already. You know, we saw it. It reminds me of the old Marx Brothers routine, you know, “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” We all watched January 6, we all know what happened. And I think that — but for legacy media, what they want to do is continue to push that and push it and push it, because they know that that’s harmful to Republicans, and they can see that we’re moving towards Republican majorities in the House and Senate, without something cataclysmic happening, and that’s what they’re attempting to cause. And so that’s why they do it, and you know it, and so do I.

HEWITT: I do. And I never talk about January 6, because I like my audience, I don’t want them to turn me off. And they’re bored, they do not like it. It is illegitimate. Nancy Pelosi quashed the minority. And yes, there are two Republicans on it. Liz Cheney has been a fine spokesperson for national security for years. I don’t know Adam [Kinzinger], but they’re opposite their party on this, obviously. I just am curious, do you think the blue bubble knows how absolutely uninterested America is in the January 6 Select Committee, which is actually a rump parliament gone wild?

CHRISTIE: No, I don’t think they have any idea, because they live in their own world. And I said this right from the beginning, Hugh, from when the committee was established, that it had undercut its ability to be a credible investigative body when Nancy Pelosi refused to allow Kevin McCarthy to put the members on that he wanted to put on. And that’s always been the right of the minority leader whether it was a Republican or Democrat. When she did it, she made it a partisan committee. And that’s not saying anything against Liz, because like you, I have great respect for Liz. But the fact is that when she prevents the minority leader from putting the members on that he wants to put on, then she makes it a partisan committee, and it makes it very, very difficult for any American to really listen intensively to what they did, you know, unlike, let’s say, the Watergate committee, Hugh, as you know, from nearly 50 years ago. That was a committee where it was a truly bipartisan committee appointed the right way to do an investigation of what went on.

HEWITT: You know, Senator, Govenror, I’m older than you, and so I had to watch that in AP Government during summer school. That’s all we did was, it was the basketball coach, so we watched four hours of Watergate hearings. Those were interesting.