Scott MacFarlane slams the legacy media over its handling of January 6 coverage MacFarlane: I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that legacy media owns some of the blame for the lying about January 6th—platforming demonstrably false information, lies about the Capitol insurrection, giving Trump an unchallenged platform at times to say the 2020 election is rigged, to say the January 6th rioters were political patriots or heroes, and to allow his surrogates to do the same. The Republicans here in Washington at the Capitol down the road—they’re silent generally about January 6th. They won’t defend it declaratively. Most of them won’t. They know it’s wrong. They were hiding for their lives or running for their lives that day. They know it was wrong; they just don’t say anything about it. They let the malignant lies go unchecked. Legacy media has done the same. They have not counterpunched effectively or efficiently against the lies about January 6th. They own some blame for the idea that $1.7 billion in taxpayer money would pay off January 6 rioters. It really is a malignant lie that didn’t get counterpunched effectively. There were a few of us—really talented reporters—and me who covered the January 6 prosecutions, who were in the courtrooms for those hearings. Sometimes there was only a few of us. Sometimes I was alone in the room, and that was negligence by mainstream media, who should have marshaled more resources, more time, more manpower, more energy toward covering the largest criminal prosecution in American history—the 1,500-plus January 6 cases. Just guys like me scrapping in the courtroom, running outside on our phones to tell you what happened. The legacy linear media let the story die. They let it atrophy. They allowed the space and the void for Trump to step in and try to rewrite it, to craft a different narrative, to flat-out lie. They left that space by underresourcing January 6th reporting. It’s really a cardinal sin to not put more time, money, and manpower into covering what I think was the defining criminal case of modern American democracy—and the first attack on the U.S. Capitol since the early 1800s