PBS Documentary Confirms the 'Storytelling' Plan About Jan. 6, but Here's How Badly They Failed

My colleague Becky Noble wrote a VIP piece earlier about a PBS documentary being done about how the Jan. 6 Committee hearings were packaged like a show to portray a narrative for the American people -- the narrative the Democrat-controlled Committee wanted to sell.

But as we previously reported, the Committee engaged James Goldston -- former president of ABC News and a documentary storyteller who ran "Good Morning America" and "Nightline" -- to help sell that narrative.

Now the documentary is confirming exactly that, with shameless comments from Adam Kinzinger about why they brought in Goldston. Goldston also explains what happened, that he got a call out of the blue that they wanted a "storyteller." "While they were brilliant lawyers, storytelling for a mass audience is not what they do," Goldston said. "Storytelling" is one way of putting it. It was Goldston who viewed it like a "miniseries" with episodes/hearings, each with a different theme.

In a remarkable PBS documentary, the January 6th committee admits the entire thing was a publicity stunt / fabricated TV production meant to manipulate the audience. Which is why they brought in the former president of ABC News [James Goldston]
"It was Goldston who envisioned… pic.twitter.com/R4oboenAnQ
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) January 31, 2024

"It was a real question of, is this going to work or not," he said. If what you are doing is a hearing into the truth, you concentrate on the truth, not whether you can manipulate the public with a slick production.

"We knew how high the stakes were," Goldston said. "We were either going to make people realize that this was important or once you've lost them you've lost them for good."

But the funny thing about that first day, as I wrote, is that they were already scaling back expectations about what they were going to present. They admitted they wanted to tie it together in a "comprehensive narrative." I wrote on that first day how former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) (I love saying "former" about her) read a tweet from former President Donald Trump on Jan. 6 but then left out the part where he said, "Go home with love and in peace."

What was truly funny was how much that first hearing bombed, with all the media attention and the effort to shape the narrative.

So to translate that into something that helps you understand how much it bombed, here’s The Hill’s media guy, Joe Concha noting that this is significantly smaller than the regular newscasts that they run that don’t have the advantage of running in primetime.

Context: The evening newscasts on CBS, NBC & ABC average anywhere from 18 to 20 million viewers combined on a typical night. Those newscasts do not air in primetime. The January 6 hearings airing in primetime Thursday took in just 11+ million viewers on those three same networks. https://t.co/KcdsM5sx3Z
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) June 10, 2022

“Context: The evening newscasts on CBS, NBC & ABC average anywhere from 18 to 20 million viewers combined on a typical night,” Concha explained. “Those newscasts do not air in primetime. The January 6 hearings airing in primetime Thursday took in just 11+ million viewers on those three same networks.”
According to Newsbusters, “evening newscast audiences on any given night last week were 1.6 times larger than the total number of broadcast viewers who tuned into the hearings on Thursday.” Of course, one of the issues is that it wasn’t “new”; most people have seen most of it and it’s from a year-and-a-half ago. Not to mention that many don’t view it as a legitimate committee, but as a political show trial.

Fox did better than CNN for the time slot, and Fox didn't even show the hearing.

People knew it was a warmed-over political show trial, and they weren't presenting anything new. Like any show that does that, you turn the channel.

Perhaps the biggest fact that shows they failed is that their primary goal was to attack Trump.

Yet Trump is still not only a very viable candidate, he's now leading Biden in multiple polls including in all seven swing states.

"Once you've lost them you lost them for good," Goldston said. They lost Americans and they still don't get it. They're so clueless about how badly they botched things that they're making a documentary to laud their efforts that failed.

Now, that's some true delusion.