The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Right now, Republican lawmakers are struggling to spin Donald Trump’s pardons of 1,500 rioters who attacked the Capitol. And on CNN, reporter Jim Acosta had a remarkable exchange with a MAGA Republican congressman, Tim Burchett, that captured some essential storylines about this moment. CNN’s Acosta refused to let the Republican get away with pretending not to know how horrific January 6 really was and pinned him down on whether he thought Trump was justified in pardoning the most violent offenders. And Acosta finally said, This is not Fox, congressman. You cannot pull the wool over people’s eyes. Why isn’t there more questioning like this of Republicans in the media? And would it make a difference if there were? We’re chatting about all this with one of our favorite guests, Matt Gertz of Media Matters. Good to see you again, Matt.
Matt Gertz: Good to be back.
Sargent: We’re going to play some excerpts from this exchange between CNN’s Jim Acosta and Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee. It’s remarkable stuff. Listen to this.
Jim Acosta (audio voiceover): Do you agree with President Trump’s decision to pardon these violent people and releasing them from jail?
Tim Burchett (audio voiceover): If they were truly violent, no. But do I know that they were? I don’t know that.
Acosta (audio voiceover): What do you mean you don’t know that? We’re showing the footage on the air right now. Congressman, you were there that day. There are offenders on January 6 who violently beat police officers. There are offenders who are convicted of seditious conspiracy. That is the truth.
Burchett (audio voiceover): This is a political world, Jim. And I don’t remember you all in CNN condemning Joe Biden for commuting the sentences of murders and child molesters, which he did.
Acosta (audio voiceover): Are you going to respond and say whether or not it is right to let these people out of jail?
Burchett (audio voiceover): I don’t know if it is or not. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll tell you what isn’t right....
Acosta (audio voiceover): You’re a congressman, you’re a member of Congress, you’re an elected official. Take a stand.
Burchett (audio voiceover): ... They were not given due process. I told you, if they cross the line, they were trespassers. Should they rot in jail for the rest of their lives in a federal penitentiary and never be charged?
Acosta (audio voiceover): Beating, not trespassing. Beating police officer, tasing police officers, seditious conspiracy. What happened to backing police officers? Your party has said time and again, We back the blue. It sounds like you let down the blue. You’re betraying the blue.
Burchett (audio voiceover): Jim, why don’t you just give an editorial and not let me come on? Look, what happened the last four years with police? What happened with all the riots that took place all across the country? Police officers were murdered.
Acosta (audio voiceover): Why not just say, You were wrong, Mr. President? Say it. Why can’t you say it?
Burchett (audio voiceover): Jim, as I said, individually, I don’t know the case.
Sargent: Matt, how often do you hear Republicans questioned like that by reporters on the air?
Gertz: Not too often. To be honest, when I first heard and saw that, my first thought was I hope Jim Acosta is going to be OK. Things are reportedly getting difficult for him over at CNN. There was a report the other day from Oliver Darcy, the former CNN reporter who now has an independent Substack, which said that Acosta had been asked to move to a two-hour time slot at midnight Eastern time from his current 10 a.m. slot. Things are apparently changing rather quickly over at CNN.
Darcy had another report that the network chief Mark Thompson had a meeting by Zoom with staff on Inauguration Day and told them that he was looking for forward-looking coverage that would avoid prejudging the Trump administration. He didn’t want to hear that Trump was, say, the first president with a felony record to take the oath. This is certainly remarkable interviewing from Acosta. I hope to see more of it, but I would worry very much that he would be smacked down for it internally rather than rewarded.
Sargent: I want to read a joke that Aaron Rupar made on Twitter. He said, “Jim Acosta was so good during this interview that CNN is gonna put him on at 4 in the morning, streaming exclusively to Greenland.” Look, CNN wants forward-looking, and what Jim Acosta did right there is apparently not forward-looking because we’re all supposed to just forget about what happened on January 6, 2021. It’s under the bridge. The voters have spoken. It doesn’t matter anymore.
Gertz: Yeah, that is apparently where we are. And I want to point out that this is the result of a very intentional, systematic effort by people on the right to break the initial consensus that January 6 was a horror show; that it had featured thousands of Trumpists, called to the White House by the president, incited with his lies about a stolen election, storming the U.S. Capitol and let loose on Congress, with scores of law enforcement officers assaulted on that day.
While there was some initial recognition on the right that this was truly a jump into the abyss, over the years, they have relentlessly pulled back from that initial understanding—that group consensus that we all shared after watching what happened in real time on our television sets—and they substituted this vicious conspiracy-minded counternarrative that the rioters were the real victims. And that spread through the right-wing press like a virus; it helped Donald Trump back to the pinnacle of the Republican Party, and then back to the presidency. And now it has been manifested in these pardons.
Sargent: What you’re getting at there, which is that there’s this separate narrative on the right about January 6, was really well-revealed in this Acosta moment as well. During this interview, Burchett keeps falling back on the counternarrative. And in the context of a CNN interview, it sounds like crazy talk; it’s inane nonsense. Yet those are things obviously that would be greeted very positively on Fox News. So Burchett was talking almost as if he were on Fox, and that’s particularly what sounded so ridiculous about it. This stuff was so absurdly off point that when it’s aired in a context where the interviewer actually knows something about the event, it is like a bubble bursting in a way. That’s what it looked like to me.
Gertz: Also, what I think is crucial is that Acosta was showing the video. He was showing footage from the assault on the U.S. Capitol. He was showing police officers getting battered by people who have now gotten pardons, and you had the congressman basically saying, I haven’t seen any of this. I don’t know what you’re talking about. With the footage right there, it just becomes obvious what a charade they’ve been putting on.
But that’s the footage that you don’t see on Fox News. They don’t want to talk about any of this. They want to have this conversation in a theoretical, Well, you know, the voters have spoken. Promised made, promised kept. They don’t want to let their viewers see the visceral realities of that day. They want them to forget.
Sargent: You had this new piece at Media Matters in which you told that whole story of how the right-wing media essentially did for years what Congressman Burchett tried to do right there: downplay the violence, pretended that Trump cared about the attacks on the cops, when they admit that there were any attacks on cops tried to use whataboutism to change the subject to Biden, Democrats, and the violence during the 2020 protests. What people who don’t watch Fox as closely as you do are unaware of is how concerted a propaganda effort this has really been. Can you get at that? There’s a relentlessness to it, right? As you say, no imagery ever of the violence or the attacks on police officers. When’s the last time imagery like that was actually on Fox?
Gertz: That’s a good question. It’s certainly been a while, I think. The original sin of this coverage was that Fox was unwilling to break with Trump. They were willing to say that the people doing the assaults in real time on January 6 were criminals. They were willing to say they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. What they weren’t willing to do was make the connection to the fact that they were there in the first place because Donald Trump had lied to them about a stolen election and told them to come to the White House. They couldn’t do that because they had also lied to the American public about how there had been a stolen election.
They were working with Trump that entire time, even as we learned through the Dominion filings, even as they knew that Joe Biden had been elected president legitimately and there had not been widespread voter fraud of the type that Trump or they were discussing. They lied to their viewers. They did it to help Trump. And now once it crested into this wave of violence, they were unable to accept responsibility for Trump, because it would meant accepting responsibility for their own actions. So what they did was they made excuses for the people who had been there that day. They said they had legitimate concerns, and then started walking back, month after month, explaining why it wasn’t really an insurrection. There weren’t really white supremacists there. I don’t know why the Democrats are still talking about this.
Once you got around to the point where the January 6 Committee was meeting, Fox wouldn’t air the hearings. Instead, they would have Tucker Carlson, who really led this effort, do his regular show and explain how there was no reason to pay attention to any of this, and it was all a lie. The counternarrative that they, mainly Tucker Carlson with the help of some fringier figures that he helped pull into the mainstream, concocted was that the whole thing had been a setup; that the FBI had basically created the whole situation; that no one had weapons, no one was hurt, everything was fine; and that these prosecutors went after the January Sixers just like they want to go after you.
They turned it into a culture-war issue. They turned it into a situation where the January Sixers were on your side, and the federal government was not. And that, over time, as Donald Trump came back into the limelight, came back up the rungs of the Republican Party back to the nomination, became the dominant narrative on the right. And now, you have situations where members of Congress are going on CNN trying to make these claims and seeing them fall flat on the space.
Sargent: Another thing that’s really jarring about this interview, and what you just said gets at this as well, is that there’s so much euphemism in the mainstream media on the subject of January 6, on the subject of Trump’s support for the rioters, on the subject of what Trump actually did to try to overthrow the government with mob violence. There’s this unbalanced situation where the euphemism that prevails in mainstream discourse is almost outweighed by this “Death Star” on the right, this black hole of lies and disinformation about that event. And it exerts this weird gravitational pull on the mainstream media and keeps it in the realm of euphemism and bothsidesism. Can you talk about that dynamic? It’s a major problem, right? You just don’t have blunt, clear talk like that from Acosta in the MSN. And that, in combination with the Death Star of Fox News, creates a highly unbalanced media ecosystem, right?
Gertz: That’s right. It’s totally asymmetric. The situation that we have, going back to the 30,000 foot view, is that the right created a counterinstitution based on the false premise that the media was unaccountably liberal and that it was an organ of the Democratic Party. And they responded to that by creating their own set of media institutions that are unaccountably right-wing and function as propaganda for the Republican Party. They do the thing that they falsely claimed the media had been doing. And that creates a lot of very bad incentives for the mainstream press. It makes them very vulnerable to bad faith right-wing actors who want to see them destroyed.
In this particular moment, with an authoritarian right-wing president who has denounced the press at every turn and made very clear that he is willing to use the power of the federal government to punish media outlets and their owners, it just leads to a very dangerous situation.
Sargent: The tenuous position that Jim Acosta is in illustrates the point, doesn’t it?
Gertz: Absolutely. And the position that CNN is in is certainly not unique. You saw ABC News settling with Donald Trump before he took office, paying $15 million for his lawsuit. You see CBS News—this was a really unnerving report last week from the Wall Street Journal—considering settling the lawsuit that Donald Trump had against them basically as part of an effort to ensure that their parent company’s merger goes through. [That is] because they fear, correctly, that Donald Trump would hold up that merger because he’s angry at the media outlet that the parent company owns.
The list goes on and on here. You see all of these major corporate news outlets responding to the authoritarian president by giving into him in advance. I get why they are doing it. They are correct to fear him. But by doing so in advance, they’re really creating impossible choices for themselves in the future.
Sargent: There was one moment that I thought was really telling as well. You may recall during the campaign, Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg for life or something like that. And then Mark Zuckerberg made this big decision to essentially cancel fact-checking on social media, and he defended that decision in language that could have come right out of Trump’s mouth or MAGA’s mouth, about how fact-checking is all biased against Republicans or something like that.
Trump was asked if he thought his threat to jail Mark Zuckerberg is what led to that decision, and he said, Yes, I do. Which was basically a way of saying, on Trump’s part, that you’re damn right I’m using the threat of jail to keep people in line, and they’d better wake up to it.
Gertz: Yeah. And what we’ve seen in the early days of this administration, in the executive orders is the total dissolution of any wall that was existing between the White House and the Department of Justice. The very order creating those 1,500 pardons also required the Justice Department to drop all of its pending cases against J6 defendants. So that’s just a diktat from the president for who should get prosecuted and who shouldn’t, which is a very strong signal to anyone who he has previously threatened publicly that it’s not a joke. It’s something that he can do at any time. And people will respond to that.
Sargent: Absolutely. Just to go back to the big picture a little bit, one sobering thing here is this: We keep thinking that Republicans will pay a price for spending all their time in the Fox News bubble. We think, Oh, they can’t really cope in exchanges with real reporters because they speak in MAGA talking points and MAGA language all the time. And this Acosta moment really shows what happens when someone who’s only fluent in MAGAese goes on with a real reporter who’s determined to question that MAGA mouthpiece.
But OK, Republicans didn’t pay a price for this, at least in this election anyway. What does that say about the info environment? Maybe they really can just speak in Fox language all the time and swing voters just won’t care? Or is this a function of the asymmetry we were talking about where the center, as it were, of the information environment is just so confused and “bothsidesy” that swing voters never really hear blunt truths anyway? Maybe Republicans have made a calculation about all this that’s correct.
Gertz: Maybe. I’m always a little nervous about making claims like that based on a single election. You could also say that they are paying a price in that the margins would have been larger if they weren’t so caught up in this right-wing insanity. You can’t run the experiment a thousand times and see if things are different under different circumstances.
But certainly, it is possible to win whether or not you are existing in the real world. The real question will be, as they try to govern based on these particular insanities, whether they are able to maintain that level of support. This is a fragile, to some extent, coalition on the right. It’s one united by Donald Trump, a one that has a number of contradictions once you get down to a policy tax. And I think we’ll see how that plays out.
Sargent: Right. Fox News might not be able to, as Acosta put it, pull the wool over voters’ eyes forever.
Gertz: It didn’t work very well when he was actually in office. That is a precedent to look to, that once he was actually president and starting to act based on the crazy stuff he was seeing on Fox News, his popularity took a nosedive.
Sargent: I will point out, though, that they’re much more determined and organized about threatening the mainstream media to keep it in line for the precise purpose of trying to prevent it from covering the administration and its policies critically.
Gertz: That’s totally true.
Sargent: When you strip this all down, I think here’s what you’re left with. The thing that none of them can ever admit to—Burchett can’t, Sean Hannity can’t, Mike Johnson can’t, none of them can—is that Donald Trump, and many in the MAGA movement, think that it’s good to violently attack Democratic lawmakers, Republican lawmakers who cross Trump, and even cops who defend the seat of government if they are arrayed against a MAGA mob trying to keep Donald Trump in office illegitimately. They think violence on Trump’s behalf is good. And that’s the one big ugly truth in the center of all this that they all have to dance around. That’s what this Acosta moment shows, right?
Gertz: I think so. Also that Trump is similarly giving pardons and commutations to people convicted of seditious conspiracy because he wanted the conspiracy to succeed. He was hoping that this was going to work. And that, I think, is the ugly truth that Republicans have not been able to say out loud and have not been challenged with quite enough. They wanted it to work.
Sargent: Right. He calls the January Sixers, including the ones who attacked cops, including the ones convicted of seditious conspiracy, patriots and heroes and political prisoners and martyrs. That means that he thinks what they did was good.
Gertz: Yeah. That is the major cleavage that is exploitable to some extent between Trump and Republicans who want to support Trump but are not entirely sociopathic.
Sargent: And you see this here with this exchange. Jim Acosta is essentially saying to him, Are you saying this stuff is acceptable or OK?
Gertz: And then it’s just whataboutism from there. It’s Soros, attorneys, so on and so forth.
Sargent: People like Burchett, who are essentially MAGA spokespeople and MAGA spinners at this point and not even lawmakers anymore, it’s interesting that someone like him can’t say what Trump says. He can’t say, It was all good.
Gertz: That gets to [questions] like: What does he actually believe, and what can he say? And what is he afraid to say because of what it would lead to down the road, either he came under fire from Trump or anything like that? There are benefits in coalition management to having pardoned a mob of zealots who have shown that they are willing to be violent on your behalf.
Sargent: Well, that gets to your core point here, which is that Republicans try to recast this or Fox News tries to recast the whole thing as looking backward, right? There’s a forward-looking element to the story here, too, which is that 1,500 convicted people are now out on the streets and released. And some of them are saying things like, It’s time to get revenge.
Tarrio said that, for instance. He came out and he said now we’re going go after the people who did this to us as if they’ve been victimized. So it would behoove Dems to start talking about this in a forward-looking way, start saying, OK, well, do you think that this was a gesture on behalf of public safety, releasing all these people the way Trump did? You know what I mean? Pin Republicans down on the forward-looking element of it.
Gertz: I think that’s right, because these people are not going away. You had Proud Boys marching in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day for the first time in years. You will see these people coming into public spaces and political spaces. I would not be shocked if some of them become MAGA media heroes. I would not be shocked if some of them get nominated for Republican congressional slots. These are going to be by virtue of the hagiography that Trump and the right-wing media have spun. They’re going to become heroes to a swath of the right and for Republicans can’t try to cleave themselves off from that. They’re going to have to deal with it in an awful big hurry.
Sargent: Maybe what might actually happen is that if Jim Acosta gets shoved out of CNN, they’ll hire one of the pardoned insurrectionists to replace him.
Gertz: Well, that would be something. I think that’s a joke, but you never really know at this point.
Sargent: Right, you sure don’t. Matt Gertz, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Gertz: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.