Unlike some of my friends on the Right, I understand the criticism of Kevin McCarthy’s decision to give Tucker Carlson exclusive access to the footage of January 6. Partisans can manipulate video, especially 41,000 hours of it, and even Tucker presumably wouldn’t disagree that he’s a partisan. It’s easy to slice up video to serve the narrative you prefer, to enhance and manipulate it, and to add dramatic flourishes to increase its emotional impact.
And we can understand that by discovering what the January 6 committee did with the video, which appears to include all of the above. I missed this over the weekend, but Miranda Devine reported that the early word from Carlson’s review is how silent the source video was:
But when you see what Carlson’s team has put together over the past two weeks of combing through thousands of hours of video, you will be struck by how different the reality was inside the building that day compared to the J6 committee’s deceptively edited primetime dramas, produced by a former ABC News president for maximum emotional impact.
For instance, Carlson’s team says the J6 committee added audio to silent CCTV footage, inserting screams and other crowd mayhem sounds, to make it seem more ominous. The bookmarks on the video trove show the J6 committee had access to the same footage yet chose to show America only what suited its divisive narrative.
There’s no sugarcoating what happened that day: J6 was shocking and violent in parts. It remains a stain on the nation, but it was not an “insurrection” or a “terrorist” attack.
