Narrative Before News At CNS

Rather than report what happened at the House hearings into the Capitol riot, CNSNews.com chose instead to not be the "news" organization it claims to be, attacking the committee and pushing right-wing conspiracy theories and narratives.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 10/10/2022

Susan Jones was quick to dismiss findings that hadn't even been revealed in a June 6 article before the first hearing:

On Thursday night, the Select House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first prime-time televised hearing so Committee Democrats -- and the committee's two Republican members -- can portray "the extent, the expanse, how broad this multi-pronged effort was" to overturn the 2020 presidential election, as Republican Rep. Liz Cheney put it on Sunday.

According to Cheney, the attack on the Capitol by an unruly mob of Trump supporters was "extremely broad, "well-organized," and "really chilling."

[...]

Schiff refused to say what witnesses might appear before the committee on Thursday night. But he did say that the "propensity for violence" will be one of the themes explored -- an interesting angle, given the failure by congressional officials to prepare for the violence they apparently anticipated.

Jones is leaning into the right-wing conspiracy theory that Nancy Pelosi somehow stopped the Capitol police from being fully prepared for the events of that day.

Jones was in full biased froth in a June 8 article, and she had one of CNS' most quotable congressmen to help stir that froth:

The House committee investigating the events of January 6th -- strategically leaking along the way -- has scheduled its first public hearing in prime time tomorrow night.

Most media outlets will cover the info-tainment event live, but not Fox News.

Appearing on Fox News Tuesday night, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said it's a sham hearing, politically motivated:

This is the only committee hearing I've ever seen in Congress where there was not an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses because there is no Republican on that committee who will do it," Jordan told "The Ingraham Angle."

The only two Republicans on the committee are Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both of them anti-Trumpers who fully agree with Democrats that the attack on the U.S. Capitol by an unruly mob amounted to "insurrection" and a threat to democracy.

The only person shot and killed on that day was an unarmed protester coming through a window.

[...]

Assisting the committee with its "choreographed" production is former ABC News President James Goldston.

Jones is leaning into another right-wing narrative, that the "unarmed protester," Ashli Babbitt, is a martyr to the cause despite the fact that she was part of a mob that had broken the window she was climbing to get through, thus making her a reasonable threat to safety (and, one can article, a domestic terrorist). Needless to say, Jones made no effort to fact-check any of Jordan's rantings.

Apparently because Jordan wasn't ranty enough, a June 9 article by Craig Bannister depicts CNS' favorite right-wing radio host going completely unhinged:

Not since the Salem Witch Trials has the U.S. seen such a one-sided prosecution of Americans who aren’t allowed to defend themselves, Constitutional Scholar Mark Levin said Wednesday, commenting on the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Select Committee investigation and hearings into the 2021 Capitol riots.

On the eve of Thursday’s nationally-televised hearing designed to smear, vilify and criminalize former President Donald Trump and select Republicans, Levin made his case during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity”:

“Never in American history, except maybe the Salem Witch Trial, have we had a court of law, or more recently, a Congressional hearing with just one side. Just one side.

“This is a Stalinist show-trial. Google it. DuckDuck it. Bing it. Go see what I mean,” Levin said.

[...]

Levin said that, when Republicans take over the House, “I hope they will investigate this committee; I hope that they will subpoena Nancy and Hoyer and all the rest” of the Democrats who actually did make threats and encourage unlawful protests intended to influence Supreme Court justices.

Like Jones, Bannister doesn't believe in fact-checking people he agrees with, though he works for a "news" organization.

Because it was under apparent orders not to cover news despite having the word "news" in its name, CNS devoted no "news"article to the findings revealed at the June 9 prime-time hearing. Indeed, the next day the hearing's findings were nowhere to be found at the top of CNS' front page, which was furiously covering everything but the hearing, as this screenshot of the CNS front page from the early afternoon of June 10 shows.

After the hearing, CNS offered only opinions, not facts. Bannister was a servile conduit for more of that in a June 10 article:

"This is a kangaroo court; this is a fixed jury," liberal Democrat and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz said Thursday, commenting on Democrats’ nationally-televised Jan. 6 Select Committee hearing.

In an interview with Newsmax, the Constitutional scholar condemned the hearing for its unfairness, partisanship and denial of due process, as well as for its predetermined conclusion.

Neither Bannister nor Dershowitz mentioned the fact that this is a hearing, not a legal proceeding. This was followed by an article from Micky Wooten, a summer intern who has been given the grand title of "Investigative Journalism Fellow":

Jan. 6 rioters causing the death of 5 cops is a "pure lie," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Thursday, while the Jan. 6 committee held its primetime hearing.

Carlson first blasted a Wednesday "CBS Nightly News" segment that parroted this assertion, proceeding to tackle a slew of CNN and MSNBC hosts repeating this falsehood.

“Policing is a tough job, as we’ve noted. But in these specific cases, the one CBS is referring to, the chief of Washington D.C.’s Police Department told the New York Times that actually he had no idea if his officers were driven to kill themselves by Jan. 6," Carlson said, referring to suicides of four cops after Jan. 6. "CBS just made that up."

For being an "Investigative Journalism Fellow," Wooten is bad at investigative journalism. In fact, the suicide of one of those officers has been ruled a line-of-duty death stemming from the injuries he received that day.

Wooten also uncritically regurgitated Carlson's claim that "The D.C. medical examiner performed an autopsy and the autopsy report showed that Officer Brian Sicknick had not suffered any kind of blunt force trauma. He was not beaten to death. He died of a stroke in his office later. " In fact, the medical examiner also ruled that "all that transpired played a role in his condition," meaning his death can be attributed to the insurrection.

Melanie Arter brought back Jordan to spread a new conspiracy theory:

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Sunday that the reason why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) didn’t call in the National Guard on Jan. 6 is because of the Democrats’ position on defunding the police.

Jordan said that last week’s prime time Jan. 6 congressional hearing didn’t explain why the U.S Capitol was so vulnerable and why the front-line cops weren’t aware that violence was going to happen.

Arter made no effort to fact-check Jordan's claim.

Meanwhile, Bannister sneered that "On Friday, President Joe Biden said that the Democrats’ nationally-televised Jan. 6 select committee on Thursday was 'all about' saving America’s democracy – but, he didn’t watch it because he had more important things to do." Which, of course, he does because he's the president and his subordinates who can watch those hearings and summarize them for him.

CNS then brought in right-wing college professor Jeffrey McCall to dismiss the hearing as "more as a political event than a search for truth or policy deliberation," adding:

Roughly 20 million Americans tuned in to the televised primetime Jan. 6 committee presentation. That seems like a lot. But considering the committee was trying to convince the nation that American democracy is at risk, that number is rather modest. Given that almost all major television outlets were shamed into providing live coverage, this audience turnout is unimpressive. Either Americans are just too oblivious to recognize the threat to democracy, or they have moved on to other concerns, of which there are many in today’s America.

If the orchestrated hearing had been a boxing match, judges would have ruled it a draw. The committee landed some punches against the Capitol miscreants and former President Trump. But in the aftermath of the hearing, it appears no public groundswell is in the offing. People have had eighteen months to ponder that fateful day and most have already processed it as they see fit.

[...]

If the Jan. 6 committee has to resort to putting on media extravaganzas to make its points, they are already rhetorically losing.

Because CNS censors non-conservative opinion, no alternative viewpoint to this was offered.

As with the first hearing, no CNS news stories have been devoted to what was covered in the five subsequent hearings. In fact, it barely recognized the existence of those hearings at all -- again, despite them being what most non-biased journalists would call news. Susan Jones spent a highly biased June 15 article (presented as "news") whining about the committee's purpose:

The carefully scripted, one-sided, anti-Trump work of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is "legislative" in nature, according to one of the Democrats who sits on the committee.

"We're a legislative committee," Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) told CNN on Tuesday. "So the purpose of our work is to provide legislative recommendations to prevent something like this from happening in the future.

"And we're looking at a whole range of things. It is not just this one particular topic (criminal referral) that's been of interest in the last day, but what can we do to protect our electoral system? What can we do to prevent something like this from actually being successful if someone were to try it again in the future?"

But beyond legislative prescriptions, the committee also is digging for evidence of criminality -- a politically motivated hunt.

By contrast, CNS has praised the work of right-wing prosecutor John Durham and how he too is "digging for evidence of criminality" without dismissing his work as "a politically motivated hunt." Jones went on to push the right-wing narrative that the hearings are biased:

Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the committee, likewise tweeted, "The committee has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals. We will announce a decision on that at an appropriate time."

[...]

Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday he is watching the hearings (the one-sided hearings) with interest.

[...]

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said last week that the committee's work is purely political, and the committee itself falls outside House rules:

"First, Nancy Pelosi has broken a 232-year history of the House by not allowing the minority to appoint anyone to the committee," he said. "This committee does not have 13 members, as the power of the House voted for it to have.

The hearings were not mentioned again until a June 30 "news" article by Jones attacking another member of the "one-sided" committee:

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, lapped up the applause on "The Late Show" with leftist host Stephen Colbert last night.

Kinzinger is one of two anti-Trump Republicans who joined Democrats in what amounts to a mock trial of Donald Trump, but there is no one on the select committee to cross examine witnesses or refute the carefully scripted, made-for-TV narrative pushed by Democrat politicians.

Kinzinger admitted that the select committee's one-sided investigation is intended to prompt legal action by the Biden Justice Department, although indictments aren't coming as fast as Kinzinger would like:

"I'm frustrated at the speed. I know they (DOJ) have a job to do," Kinzinger said.

[...]

Kinzinger said the select committee is getting new information "every day." And he's already touting what he views as the historic nature of what critics deride as an anti-Trump witch-hunt:

"Yeah, I think we're going to do a couple more hearings. Obviously the investigation will continue," Kinzinger said.

[...]

(The interview ended at that point, with Colbert thanking Kinzinger "for your dedication to representative democracy.")

Jones is clearly one of those "critics," even though she's supposed to be a fair and objective reporter.

That same day came another "news" article by Jones which brought the only specific acknowledgment of a committee hearing other than the first one -- which, of course, was focused on trashing the witness of that hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson, former staffer for then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows:

President Donald Trump says he personally rejected Cassidy Hutchinson for a job with his post-presidency team in Palm Beach, Florida.

And former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump supporter, backed up Trump's statement in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday night.

Bondi said she had two conversations with Hutchinson, who "loved President Trump" and was "very upset" she was turned down for a job in Florida.

"She reached out to me because she was very excited she was moving to palm beach to work for the president. She loved president trump well after the election. She loved him," Bondi said.

After uncritically repeating that attack, Jones then surprisingly and fairly summarized Hutchinson's testimony. So Jones does know how to act like a journalist when it suits her purposes to do so -- though, of course, that was buried at the end with the Trump and Bondi attacks on Hutchinson headlining her piece.

Whining from Ron Paul

CNS also called on Ron Paul -- whom CNS also let rant against NATO and cheer his son's efforts to obstruct U.S. aid to Ukraine -- to complain about the hearings as well. In a June 13 column, Paul invoked the usual right-wing talking points that the hearings are a distraction from problems facing President Biden and that they will hide evidence that so many of them were secret "government informers":

With so much going wrong in areas Americans are most worried about, the Democrats have for some reason decided that the ticket to electoral success in November is to bring back “Insurrection Theater” in the form of new hearings on the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

The House Jan. 6 Committee even hired former ABC News President James Goldston to make a show of June’s primetime hearings. That makes sense, because like all mainstream media productions, these hearings have had nothing to do with getting at the truth behind the events of Jan. 6 and everything to do with trying to drum up more partisan anger and fear.

What we won’t see in the hearings is any of the 14,000 unreleased hours of surveillance. What little we have been able to see so far has raised more questions than answers about the official telling of the events. We also won’t hear anything about how many of the “insurrectionists” were actually government informers or even provocateurs. And we certainly won’t get any answers as to why the police actually seemed to be opening the doors and inviting the people inside.

Maybe that’s because the Jan. 6 Committee is a star chamber, where the only Republicans – the deeply unpopular Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – have been hand-selected by Nancy Pelosi.

Paul also played the trope that the hearings are a failure because nobody was watching them:

As we have seen over the past two years of COVID lies and deceptions, pushing fear and anger can be very effective in politics, and both parties are guilty. But this time it doesn’t seem to be working. Though all major networks except Fox News preempted their prime-time programming to carry the hearings live, Americans did not flock to the production.

While the low-ranked MSNBC and CNN did see a boost in viewers, the Democratic Party production hardly took the U.S. viewing audience by storm. As The Daily Caller reported, “CBS News’s ‘Capitol Assault Hearings’ had 3.36 total viewership and 780,000 in the 25-54 demographic, according to TV Series Finale.”

Again, about 19 million people watched the first hearing over all outlets, which puts the lie to the claim that nobody watched it.

Paul concluded by inserting his tired old war against the Federal Reserve:

The Democrats are betting that selling fear and anger is a winning ticket for November. While Republicans share a good deal of the blame for the current economic crisis, pretending it’s all the Democrats' fault will likely bring in big returns.

Meanwhile, no one at all wants to talk about how the Fed, with the participation of Congress, is leading us to economic disaster.

And he's accusing Democrats of desperation?