On January 6, 2021, thousands of protesters formed a mob and sieged our nation’s Capitol building as lawmakers were working to certify the 2020 Presidential Election results. While the events of that fateful and deadly day have now been widely reported and shared on news and social media sites, a report released on April, 10th, 2021, shows new details. In a never-before released Pentagon Report, a timeline is established to try and make sense of the events of that day.
The Jan. 6 Capitol Siege was a major news event that was live streamed, broadcast, and tracked on social media throughout the duration. This report now gives us an insight on how the events unfolded on the inside of the Capitol and beyond.
“Watch Kevin” breaks down all 10 hours of the siege using multiple news sources below:
While nobody is disputing the contents of the new report, there have been different accounts of who is at fault depending on the account or news source that’s posting it.
Below is the AllSides Media Bias Chart that outlines, based on online political content, can help give you an understanding of the motivations that drive content from these sources.
The most important thing to examine when looking at the relationship between news publications and how those same reports are shared on social media. Social media is the fire of commentary, opinion, and disinformation when talking about news. Yes, social media is convenient for finding and ingesting news, but with each organization having its own bias, it can depend completely on who you follow for how your opinion is formed.
With that being said, are there ever events that are so uniform in its importance and seriousness that bias is forgotten in the name of Journalism. I would argue there are and in the case of the Pentagon Report of Jan. 6, this is one of those instances.
Individual social media accounts post captions on the linked news story that shows their own slant, but that doesn’t change the content of the news story being linked to. Forgetting far right and far-left fringe new organizations, most mainstream media has been reporting this the same.
In a link directly to their website, the Washington Post highlights the Army’s unwillingness to help in the conflict, but I could not locate this same headline posted anywhere on social media. The Washington Post skews to the left of the MediaBias matrix.
Below are tweets from the AP, Daily Beast and The Hill. According to the MediaBias matrix, the AP is the most neutral, with The Daily Beast leaning right and The Hill leaning left.
We can see the messaging on Twitter from these News Outlets is almost uniform. In other cases, such as the election, these sites were at odds as far as how they communicated the message of their article on social media. But for this event, a massive riot and siege we had never seen before, the message is the same.
Over the course of the last decade, we have seen news organizations take to social media as a bedrock of communicating with their audience. With that, we have seen organizations take sides and develop bias based on the response from their audience.
There are some events so important to the history and fabric of our country, that bias needs to be put aside for the good of the nation. The Capitol Siege is one of these moments where the exact content of the stories may vary, but the messaging is the same.