Headline Roundup • June 9th, 2022
How Do Americans Feel About the Jan. 6 Hearings?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot will hold a public hearing Thursday to begin laying out its findings. Will the rest of America pay attention?
Most major cable and broadcast networks, with the exception of Fox News, will show the hearing live beginning Thursday at 8 p.m. ET. It's the first of several hearings that will take place throughout June.
Recent opinion polls suggest a public divide over whether the committee's work is necessary. One April poll from Navigator Research suggested that 39% of voters thought the committee was too focused on the past, compared to 49% who said it was doing important work. Another January poll from Pew Research Center (Center bias) suggested that 35% of people think too much attention had been paid to the Capitol riot, while 33 percent said the right amount of attention had been given, and 31 percent said not enough.
Left- and center-rated news sources have spent much more time previewing the hearings and predicting consequences for perpetrators than right-rated sources have. Some sources on the right downplay the hearing's significance and frame the House committee as overly partisan. Voices on both sides agree that the hearings may not affect public opinion about the riot much, but for different reasons. One Vox writer said the hearing is unlikely to sway Republicans who already doubt the committee's legitimacy. One Washington Times writer argued that Americans have bigger things to focus on, such as crime and inflation.
Featured Coverage of this Story
YVONNE HEMSEY / GETTY IMAGES
There are certain moments in congressional history that have lived on even longer than the octogenarians who stalk the halls of Capitol Hill. They are the scenes that feel torn from the pages of a political drama: Sen. Howard Baker Jr. repeatedly asking during the Watergate hearings, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Army lawyer Joseph Welch excoriating Sen. Joseph McCarthy with a rhetorical question during the Army-McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency?” A panel of tobacco executives testifying one by one before Congress, incredulously, that nicotine...
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
In his new book The Right, conservative journalist Matthew Continetti describes the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot as the decisive event in Donald Trump’s presidency: one that transformed it from what he sees as a largely successful enterprise into a disastrous one.
“If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader,” Continetti writes. “Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6.”
If polling data is anything to...
Linas Garsys/The Washington Times
If the Jan. 6 House select committee’s infamous track record is any indication, it would have already leaked new smoking-gun evidence in their possession heading into Thursday’s prime time hearings. But there was no leak because there is no smoking gun.
Instead, last Friday, the illegitimate Jan. 6 committee — choking from a lack of relevancy — was handed a lifeline as the politicized Biden Justice Department indicted former Trump adviser Peter Navarro for allegedly being in contempt of Congress. It was unbelievably fortunate and coincidental timing for a committee desperate to...
AllSides Picks
Red Blue Translator
Social Justice
Headline Roundup
ICE Detains Conservative Influencer Milo Yiannopoulos in Louisiana
August 28th, 2026
Headline Roundup
USAID Report Claims Over 100 UNRWA Employees Participated in October 7 Attacks
August 28th, 2026
Blog
Will Data Centers Create Blackouts? Examining Media Bias and Misinformation on The Tucker Carlson Show
Julie Mastrine
August 28th, 2026
