By the numbers, the Jan. 6 committee hearings attracted 20 million live viewers on opening night, 11 million for the first daytime session and nearly 9 million for Thursday’s third installment. Yet those traditional Nielsen company yardsticks don’t begin to measure the true reach of what is being said there. Memorable moments from each hearing are sliced for quick consumption on countless news programs, comedy shows and online, to the point where some have been seen more times later than when they were live. In many respects, it’s the first congressional hearing in memory that seems specifically designed with modern media needs in mind, said Jeff Jarvis, a City University of New York journalism professor and frequent blogger on the media. “That has already worked,” he said. While it’s impossible to know what — if anything — covered in the initial stages of the hearing will stick much beyond the week’s news, there are already breakout moments and characters. GIULIANI AND ALCOHOL Receiving wide circulation: snippets where President Donald Trump’s former political director, Bill Stepien, aide Jason Miller and committee member Liz Cheney say that lawyer Rudy Giuliani had too much to drink before advising Trump on election night 2020. Hours after the allegation had been made, the clips were featured in the monologues of top-rated late-night comics Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. The shows are typically seen by a combined audience of nearly 5 million people each night, with many more people watching online the next morning. Kimmel accompanied it with a film package of times when Giuliani acted oddly in defense of Trump. The episode resonated in part because it was a connectable moment in an otherwise very serious story, said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “Having people who are major figures in a national political setting outed for being wasted is something that people can find immediately understandable,” Thompson said. BARR’S REALITY Former Attorney General William Barr’s recorded testimony that he found Trump “detached from reality” with some of his claims about election fraud was the lead in several news stories about Monday’s hearing. It was a vivid and disturbing image of a former president from the man who ran Trump’s Justice Department. The ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts that night all featured the clip of Barr’s comment, and together the three programs typically reach more than 20 million viewers — or double the amount of people who saw the hearing live. There’s no count of how many times it was repeated on cable news, or estimate of how many people saw it that way. Two anecdotal examples illustrate the extent to which it was seen online. A clip of the moment posted by Reuters on Facebook was watched 928,000 times, and the clip posted on The New York Times’ Instagram account was seen 404,000 times. DAUGHTER AND SON-IN-LAW Filmed testimony from Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner has been particularly potent, in large part simply because they come from the family of a man who prizes loyalty. A clip of Ivanka Trump saying she trusted Barr’s assessment of the fraud allegations amassed more than 1.6 million views in an Instagram post published by The Shade Room, a media outlet that focuses on celebrity entertainment, and 1 […]

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