The Question the Media Should be Asking MTG About Jan 6 Vids

In the months since Tucker Carlson cherry picked and aired videos of January 6^th protestors looking like a herd of misguided, yet mostly-peaceful, cattle, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been calling for the public release of all 44,000 hours of video footage from that day.

As recently as a month ago, she took to twitter to renew her call for the public to have access, “because it’s hard to lie to people all the time when they can go look at it and form their own opinion.” 

And then a few days ago, something changed. Rep Greene did a 180 and decided it would not be in the public interest for us to see these videos after all. Instead of allowing us, the public, to form our own opinion, she now claims public examination of those videos pose a security risk to the Capitol. Further, she is concerned with the doxing of innocent bystanders who may appear in the footage and not be engaging in the violence of that day.

I have spoken to a few individuals who have seen these videos and they have come away shaken by what they have seen. I have been told that anyone who watches the videos hoping to see a peaceful demonstration will walk away with a very different perspective. To be fair, I have not seen them myself, so I am relying on what others have described to me.

What I cannot say for certain at this point is whether Rep. Greene has seen the videos. I reached out to her staff yesterday, and again today, to inquire if she did watch anything on them, and if so what kind of impact did it have on her?

And this is the question I have not seen the media ask Rep. Greene about, and I cannot figure out why no enterprising reporter has done so yet. Did she see it? And if so, is that why she is now flip flopping on sharing what is on there? And if she watched, how did it make her feel?

I can almost buy the line that security of the Capitol is a concern but what keeps me from completing the purchase is that she didn’t express any care of that up until a few days ago. And I am empathetic to the argument that one would care about doxing, but there are ways to deal with that in addition to it never being on her list of concerns before. In fact, all of the concerns she is expressing now were true days ago and it didn’t keep her from calling for the public to make up their own mind.

So what changed?  The media need to be asking.