The New York Times, which has become a semi-official house organ of the Democrats, also serves as a pilot fish for the rest of the establishment media.  So, when it failed to mention Tucker Carlson's first screening of censored J6 video Monday in its Tuesday morning edition, one can reasonably infer that the initial strategy was to ignore the videos.

As Richard Baehr noted in an email:

I think the original strategy of the left was to demand that everybody get what McCarthy sent to Tucker.  Now, this seems to be changing.  Just let story get the right riled up for a week, make them more hysterical and everybody not in this [the progressive] camp is unaffected.  Their narrative  was skillfully implanted, and they believe only the hard core right is still challenging this.   The left received  all the media attention on the  January 6 committee they wanted.  Tucker they will ignore on this one.

But that strategy did not last the morning.  As Andrea Widburg chronicled here yesterday, "Democrats came out swinging," filling the airwaves (and Congress) with shrill denunciations of Tucker, Republicans, and J6 detainees.  Chuck Schumer even had the gall to go on the Senate floor and demand that Rupert Murdoch censor Carlson.  It sure looked like panic.

I don't know if there was any collective reassessment of the damage done to their control of the narrative, or if various individual Democrats and media figures (but I repeat myself) decided on their own that they just could not let stand the access to suppressed evidence.  But ignoring the videos was deemed an ineffective strategy...at least for now.

Subsequently, nominal conservatives like Mitch McConnell and National Review enormously aided the Democrats' suppression efforts by joining in condemning Carlson.  By enabling them to portray the release as an evil extremist plot to confuse people with facts, the memory hole was enhanced as the ultimate destination.  In other words, the strategy remained to have enough people dismiss the videos as inconsequential so as to ignore them in the longer run — i.e., up until November 2024.   

But will this work?

We can't say now because there are yet more revelations to come, no doubt, from the censored videos.  But we already have the disconcerting footage of a man sentenced to four years in prison, Jacob Chansley, AKA the "QAnon Shaman," being peacefully escorted through the Capitol like a schoolchild on an excursion, and even saying a prayer of thanks to the Capitol cops.  The Democrats have spent years lecturing us about "over-incarceration," so this excessive penalty has to disturb the conscience.  It totally contradicts the "violent insurrection" narrative that the Dems have pushed, using Chansley as their iconic figure.

I have no doubt that the Dems will resort, as they always do, to the sheer power of repetition in the 90% of the media they control to dismiss the videos and let them fade in memory.

It is up to us, the conservative media, and to those few Republicans not affiliated with the Uniparty, to keep the outrage alive.  Will it work?  It has to affect the persuadable segment of the electorate of the extreme injustice of the treatment of the detainees, and of the utter BS they have been fed.  Given the low level of trust in the media by the general public, there is at least some hope.

Caricature by Donkey Hotey, CC BY 2.0 license.