CNN anchor and former Fox News star Chris Wallace delivered a whopper of a trash take on the Jan. 6 hearings, citing wins by “Big Lie” proponents as evidence the blockbuster hearings aren’t “changing minds.”

Wallace was a guest on Thursday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, and spent one segment discussing news relevant to the hearings with co-anchors Brianna Keilar and John Berman.

At the end of that segment, Berman asked Wallace for his analysis of the hearings, and that’s when Wallace let ‘er rip:

Well, I think that they’ve done a very effective job so far, and they’ve only had two hearings. But the opening sequence, in which they basically went through the whole thing, and then specifically when they focused on what, you know, what has been called The Big Lie, the argument that in fact, Donald Trump knew that he’d lost the election and continued to pursue this argument that it was a stolen election and a rigged election. I think they’ve done a good job of that.

But, you know, I was skeptical from the start, and said so before the first hearing, John, about what impact that would have. And all you have to do is look at the results of the primaries on Tuesday, where you have Tom Rice, one of the very few, I think it was ten Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over the January 6 riot. He’s a five-time, five-term congressman from South Carolina. And not only was he beaten in the Republican primary, but the election-denying challenger Russell Fry got 50 plus percent of the vote. And this five-term congressman Tom Rice got 25%, for an incumbent that’s pretty bad. You also had election deniers winning, including for secretary of state and the Republican nominee in Nevada, a swing state.

So, you know, are they doing an effective job in making their case? Yes. Is it going to change people’s minds? I think that’s very much to be determined, and the early indications are not so much.

Now, Wallace built a reputation and a fandom inside political media for being the Fox News host most likely to confront Trump figures with reality, lending him a gravity that he carries with him to CNN. When Wallace has a take that goes against the conservative media, particularly where Trump is concerned, people listen. Influential people.

I say all of this to explain why it’s so terrible when Wallace has a garbage take like this one, which is that it will influence the pliable political media that’s already predisposed to trivial thinking like this.

Wallace’s analysis is fatally flawed, but only on two out of two possible bases. The victories by Big Lie believers in Republican primaries aren’t the least bit indicative of the committee’s influence over Americans, or even over Republicans, who may have their minds changed.

Republican voters are a small fraction of the American people — Trump was elected in 2016 by just over 26 percent of the voting-age population — and Republican primary voters in a midterm year are an even smaller fraction of that fraction, and the most intense segment of people who believe by 76 PERCENT that President Joe Biden didn’t “legitimately” win the presidency aren’t really the target persuadable audience.

The other fatal flaw is the assertion that “changing minds” is the main purpose of the hearings, or is even an important one. There’s already overwhelming public sentiment — around 70 percent in most cases — that what Trump and his followers did were crimes, and massive support for prosecuting those crimes. The purpose is to get to the truth, and for that truth to provide a roadmap for justice to be done. Accountability — all the way to the top, if need be — is the surest way to prevent such an attack on our democracy from ever succeeding in the future.

Wallace rolled out a version of this after the first hearing, where he seemed to simply be casting about for some way to appear objective after what he called a “very powerful” hearing. But his latest iteration has the reek of a full-blown narrative that Wallace should discard like month-old liverwurst.

Watch above via CNN.

The post Chris Wallace’s Terrible Take on Jan. 6 Committee: Hearings Aren’t ‘Changing Minds’ Because Trumpists Won Primaries first appeared on Mediaite.

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