The January 6th Committee has finally turned the corner – and turned things upside down
Now that the January 6th Committee has unearthed enough dirt for the media to want to run with it daily as a Trump/GOP scandal, the media no longer feels compelled to make up phony Biden scandals for ratings, and President Biden’s approval rating is ticking upward accordingly. Funny how that works.
Keep in mind that the mainstream media (with the exception of Fox News) doesn’t really want to have to rely on phony Biden scandals for ratings. That causes credibility issues for them, and it turns out phony Biden scandals don’t boost ratings much anyway. It’s just all they’ve had to work with lately.
Trump is under criminal investigation in three jurisdictions, two of which have reached the grand jury stage. The likelihood of Trump being indicted on the state level is a huge, pivotal story with widespread implications. But information and details publicly surface so slowly at this stage of a criminal probe, the media can’t do daily stories on it, and so instead the media mostly just ignores it.
And for quite awhile the 1/6 committee was in information gathering mode with lower level witnesses, which is what gives you dirt on the bigger fish and allows you to make a run at them. But that also produced very little public information during that timeframe, so the media saw the topic as not particularly viable for producing daily ratings.
Now that the 1/6 probe has unearthed dirt about Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and other big names, and now that it’s clear more dirt will surface every day for awhile going forward, the media seems comfortable settling in with this as its main daily narrative. The media is still throwing in some doomsday hyperbole for good measure. But fake Biden scandals are apparently no longer needed.
This is lucky for the media, because not only did the fake Biden scandals not really boost ratings, they’re becoming non-viable. No one is still talking about the Afghanistan pullout, as we predicted. And average U.S. gas prices have been dropping steadily for six weeks now, so the media can’t keep getting away with falsely telling audiences they’re rising, as it did for the first few weeks that average gas prices were dropping.
It’s important to keep in mind that the people in the mainstream media are not the “good guys”, but nor are they cartoon villains. Major media types just consider it their job to hit their ratings marks no matter what – and then the more honest among them will try to include some truth and knowledge within that ratings framework if they can.
Now that the January 6th Committee is finally in a position to be able to keep putting increasingly juicy and damning news out there on a daily basis with regard to Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and January 6th, here’s hoping that the media is willing to keep running with all of this in honest fashion, and therefore doesn’t feel compelled to pummel audiences with either doomsday hysteria or phony scandals about Joe Biden. While the point of the 1/6 probe is to hold people accountable for a treasonous plot, it’s starting to have the interesting side effect of steering the media away from some of its worst habits.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report