si signs about a looming recession in the united states. we ll crunch the numbers. first, let s say it. nay to the naysayers. the skeptics and cynics that said the january 6th hearings wouldn t matter. turns out they were. reporter: very wrong. the media personalities that said nobody would watch and care have seen otherwise. let s be honest. there was a bit of this prognosis, some people thought the summertime hearings would fizzle out over time but they actually picked up steam as june turned to july. tv ratings stayed strong throughout the series. it s weird to say it s a series but it was a summer series of television and urn turned out t one of the highest rated shows of the summer. despite the maga people that said nobody was watching, it reached tens of millions of people. as an attention exercise, it gained a lot of attention. as a fact 2350finding effort, i brought a lot of new facts. as a political expert, i ll save that. tucker charleston called the shameful ot
in marymaryland, 2020 elect lies won the republican primary for governor and recent recalled him in another effort to overturn the 2020 results and in arizona, leading gop candidate for senate there is raising doubts about the legitimacy of the coming midterms. 538 says 120 election deniers won the party s nomination and will be on the ballot in various races this fall. it s all still happening, which is why the group protect democracy has a new quote authoritarian playbook to help the media think through the challenges of covering these issues. it s a really fascinating report from the group. jennifer was the lead author of the report researching authoritarian policies for years and at the group for democr you know, the standers we layout in the playbook are win ever ones we think are non-partisan, they are based on what the experts say about these things. so these standards apply equally to everyone. when you look at what researchers say there are certain areas it suggest the repub
direction you want? tell us how that works. first of all, i don t moderate the focus groups. i have somebody else moderating them. okay. i think, actually, i would say for the record that like i said, i was very skeptical of the trump s grip on the gop is slipping and i was the one arguing when everybody else started to advance that after georgia that that was not that was an over read of what would happen to georgia. so i m not looking for these voters to say and the reason was so many voters still said they loved donald trump. so this is just a natural shift that we ve observed and it s such a remarkable shift that i think it s notable. i agree. sarah, please stay with me. let me bring in more guests. jennifer is here. cnn media analyst david and staff writer at the atlantic. david, from first to you, what sarah is sharing from these focus groups, what do you make of it? how do you assess this? is this a notable news worthy
the wall street journal , the new york post this weekend, we ll put the quotes on screen. the wall street journal saying characters revealed in a crisis mr. pence passed the trial and utterly failed his. here is the new york post. it s up to the justice department to decide what happened on january 6th with the president is a crime but as a matter of principle and character, trump has proven himself unworthy to be the chief executive again. david, these are two papers controlled by rupert murdoch that controls fox news. we ve seen this happening for awhile. we ve seen rupert murdoch distance himself from trump for awhile but i haven t seen the new york post up until now say trump is unworthy of being president. brian, i was really impressed by the post editorial. i wanted to almost cheer for that when i heard that line but, but, murdoch has done so much with his broadcast outlets and cable outlets and to create this char a character and he s such a slippery character that se
david, do you agree as a tv critic, these hearings, how would you asses them? brilliant. it s a masterpiece and you talked about the people naysayers. i was not a nay sayer. i was impressed with what i thought they were going to do but they went beyond my wildest expectations on what they could do. look, number one, they laid down a templet for how to make government interesting in prime time television to get tens of millions of people who watch it. we don t teach civics anymore in our classrooms. this was a great seven vehicles le civics lesson. you got it by osmosis engaged in the drama but you got that. that s one thing they did. they also laid down for historians an account of what happened on january 6th based on sworn testimony, based on eyewitness accounts, based on documentary visual imagery that will serve history and blows up to some extent what the right