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In the world of print media, the editorial boards of The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal are some of the most Republican-friendly territories in the United States. With this in mind, when both newspapers publish scathing criticisms of Donald Trump and his Jan. 6 role, it tends to raise a few eyebrows. As NPR summarized yesterday:
“The editorial boards of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post have issued harsh critiques of former President Donald Trump following the January 6 committee’s final hearing of the summer. The Post said the former president is ‘unworthy to lead the country’ again. The Journal called the facts ‘sobering’ and called out Trump for his ‘inflammatory tweets.’ These editorials both published in major newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch.”
Both editorials are worth considering in detail. The Post, whose editors Trump has cited on many occasions, marveled at Trump’s refusal to act while the Capitol was under attack.
Reflecting on the evidence presented by the Jan. 6 committee, the Post’s editorial board added, “His only focus was to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power. There is no other explanation, just as there is no defense, for his refusal to stop the violence.
“It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.”
The Journal’s editors were hardly more generous. Though they had some unflattering words for the bipartisan House select committee, the Journal conceded, “Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call Mr. Pence to check on the safety of his loyal VP. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out.”
The editorial board concluded, “Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his.”
Not surprisingly, the broader circumstances — two Murdoch-owned newspapers, on the same day, criticizing the former president in unusually strong terms — led to quite a bit of chatter about Trump’s influence and the degree to which it may be waning in conservative media.
It’s an easy dynamic to exaggerate. Indeed, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple made the case that the former president wouldn’t really be in trouble until a different Murdoch-owned media enterprise makes related Trump criticisms.
Newspaper editorials and cable television shows are dramatically different platforms, as the Murdochs have learned. Under the ineffable laws of media distribution, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal can write editorials zinging Trump without causing much, if any, harm to their respective business models. The same doesn’t hold true for the opinion hours on Fox News, where unleashing the sort of logic deployed in Friday’s editorials would likely spark viewer revolts and a scramble for competing channels willing to indulge Trump’s fantasies. So yeah, when Hannity starts blasting away at Trump, we’ll know something’s up.
That’s more than fair and quite persuasive. But what struck me as notable about the editorials from late last week was what they told us, not about a corporate/media/political dynamic, but about the potency of the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings.
There’s been speculation for months about whether people would watch the proceedings, whether the hearings would produce new revelations, whether the information would be credible, and whether people with Trump sympathies might be persuaded by the presentations.
And it was against this backdrop that two of the most Republican-friendly editorial boards in all of American print media watched the hearings, took stock of the seriousness of what they learned, and immediately published scathing criticisms of the former president.
All of which suggests that the hearings are, in fact, making a difference.