News producers prepared for an unusual political event and switched to chronicling the siege by a pro-Trump mob.
“We are witnessing an attempt at sedition,” said the CNN anchor Jake Tapper.
“This is a crime,” said Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
“This is the most significant breach of an American government institution” since the War of 1812, said Chad Pergram, the veteran congressional reporter on Fox News, adding: “The mob upended American democracy today.”
Preparing for a dramatic day in politics, television networks shifted quickly on Wednesday into the breaking news format usually reserved for foreign wars, natural disasters or terrorist attacks — only these events were unfolding live inside the most sacred spaces of American democracy.
Some anchors’ voices trembled as they narrated a siege on the United States Capitol, as the insurrection of President Trump’s supporters — incited by the president’s false claims of a stolen election — broke through barricades outside the historic building and stormed the chambers of the House and Senate, upending an effort to ratify the Electoral College vote and forcing the nation’s political leaders into hiding.
Shaky cameras and shocked correspondents dominated the coverage, but some of the most chilling footage emanated from the static cameras of C-SPAN, which watched silently as Vice President Mike Pence was abruptly ushered off the Senate floor by security forces and legislators reached for gas masks. Some law enforcement officials were seen with guns drawn.
“I heard on the radio ‘shots fired,’ 10, 15 minutes ago,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, said in a live telephone interview on Fox News from an undisclosed location after legislators were evacuated. He called the protesters’ actions “un-American.”
Yet Mr. McCarthy, a staunch Trump ally, had been among the leading voices in the right-wing media world — including the Fox News opinion shows that champion Mr. Trump — encouraging his party to contest the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., despite no evidence of fraud.
Fox News’s coverage on Wednesday seemed to waver at times on how to cover those who smashed windows and vandalized congressional offices. Martha MacCallum, one of Fox News’s lead news anchors, compared the mob’s activity to an incident this week in which graffiti was sprayed at a residence of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. It was a bizarre link from the swarms of Trump supporters breaking into the seat of democracy, an event that made worldwide news, to a small-scale incident at the home of an Republican official.
Earlier on Wednesday, as other networks carried panel discussions, Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax broadcast Mr. Trump’s incendiary, falsehood-laden speech in full, including when he urged his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Personalities on right-wing media outlets, who have helped fuel a movement built on misinformation and conspiracy theories, were clearly reluctant to fault Mr. Trump for the violent actions of his supporters. On Newsmax, a conservative network that caters to Trump partisans — and whose most popular host, Greg Kelly, has insisted without basis that Mr. Trump can still win the election — commentators tried to cast blame on the mainstream media instead.
Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner and felon who was pardoned by Mr. Trump, asserted on Newsmax that journalists “are acting like it was an armed takeover of the Capitol and that’s nonsense.” He added, despite ample footage of the riot, that “you have six to 10 people who entered the building. OK, deal with it.”
In tranquil times, the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote is the sort of rudimentary government business typically relegated to C-SPAN. Even before the mob headed to the Capitol, the networks were prepared for a marathon day of minute-by-minute Washington coverage, as allies of President Trump in the House and Senate planned a last-ditch effort to subvert the results of the election.
As the joint session of Congress began at 1 p.m., most networks ran an uninterrupted live feed from the House and Senate floors. On CNN, just after 2 p.m., Wolf Blitzer broke in with a report that “protesters are getting assertive” as the mob breached the compound’s outer doors.
Over the next hours, scenes flashed across American televisions that many citizens would never have imagined emanating from the nation’s capital. A bloodied woman carried from the Capitol on a stretcher by paramedics. Law enforcement officers drawing guns inside the House. Rioters running unfettered inside the congressional chambers smashing glass.
The CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip called the scene “a tragedy”; Van Jones described the actions as “treason.” Chuck Todd on MSNBC called it “a scene from a bad movie.” On CBS, Major Garrett called it “a cleavage, a ripping apart of a sense of what government is, what it’s meant to accomplish and how it is sanctified in every presidential election.”
On Fox News, the anchor Chris Wallace framed the events as “the rule of the mob versus the rule of law and the Constitution,” noting that Mr. Trump spent an hour on Wednesday “filling a crowd with misstatements, with facts that have been absolutely shredded.”
Shortly before 4:30 p.m., Mr. Trump released a video statement, ostensibly to urge his supporters in Washington to peacefully disperse, that opened with his baseless, incendiary assertion that “we had an election stolen from us.”
Mr. Tapper, in the CNN anchor chair, told viewers he had aired the tape because Mr. Trump was addressing “his supporters who are right now conducting an armed insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.”
“But I also want to note that in that video, he lies about the election being stolen and pours more fuel on the fire,” Mr. Tapper went on. “He continues his shameful behavior of lying to his supporters about what happened. It is absolutely disgraceful. I feel ambivalent about the fact that we even aired it.”
On MSNBC, Mr. Todd had similar qualms, urging his producers to take down a photograph of an interloper lounging in the House speaker’s chair. “Don’t glorify it,” Mr. Todd said. Earlier, he described the people who stormed the Capitol as “terrorists.”
Shortly after 5:30, as the authorities moved the mob away from the Capitol, they hurled epithets at the CNN correspondent on the ground, Donie O’Sullivan. “We’re hearing some vile language being directed at members of the media,” he said, as the 6 p.m. citywide curfew approached.
The anchor Brian Williams described it as “a tremendously sad day.”
“We should make no mistake: These are rioters, these are insurrectionists, they have been cheered on by the president and prominent Republicans in Congress,” he said. “They have stormed the U.S. Capitol, and they have done so with ease.”
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TV Networks Shift From Coverage of Electoral Tally to Storming of Capitol - The New York Times
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