After obsessing over the January 6 Capitol Hill riot for the past year, the media are now using its one-year anniversary to advocate for unprecedented, sweeping election reforms.
Democrats would have been foolish not to make political hay out of this anniversary, and so they've decided to wield it as a justification for federalizing America's elections. Naturally, their friends in the media quickly flooded the zone with articles and TV segments supporting the party's cause.
Watch the video below for a glimpse of the media's shameless January 6 activism:
The media barrage began with a January 1 New York Times piece by the paper’s editorial board, titled, “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now.” The authors hyperventilated:
Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day… the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.
A few key points comprised the article's thesis: that election reforms by Republican-led state legislatures constitute a continuation of the January 6, 2021 mentality; that American democracy is in dire peril; and that the only solution is to pass the sweeping federal election reforms proposed by Congressional Democrats. These were to be the media's talking points on the topic, and journalists have been reciting them obediently all week.
Just a day after the Times piece was published, NBC political director Chuck Todd was sounding the alarm bells on Meet The Press: “You got one party that’s being led by Trump here that seems to be trying to delegitimize our democracy.” In a later segment, PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor added: “Overall, what we’re seeing is a fragility of American democracy and Americans really not quite, I think, grasping how dangerous this is.”
Boston Globe journalist Kimberly Atkins Stohr directly connected the Capitol Hill riot to election reform on the January 3 edition of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports: “There’s a direct through-line between what we saw on January 6th and this issue of voting rights. I’m surprised that it took a year after this attempted coup at the Capitol for the President to really focus in on this, but these two things really go hand in hand.”
The following day on CNN’s Inside Politics, Daily Beast Washington bureau chief Jackie Kucinich warned darkly: “January 6th never ended in a lot of ways. It’s ongoing.”
With the 6th now upon us, Americans are in for a day jam-packed with cynical political gamesmanship and overtures about Our Democracy™.
But don’t expect the press to stop haranguing about the Capitol riot once the fight over election laws is gone from the news cycle. January 6 has been the media’s favorite rhetorical cudgel for the past year, and they’re not likely to put it back on the shelf anytime soon.
