The attempted coup on January 6 is THE big story of 2021, overshadowing all others. Trump and a team crooked cohorts in his cabinet and in Congress attempted to throw out the election results. The dynamics of power, similar to mafioso-style intimidation and manipulation have revealed loyalty to mob-boss Trump trumps duty to elected constitutents. Key Trump bootlickers who engineered the attempted coup like Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows refused to testify before the House panel.
Division among democrats in Congress was among the top stories in 2021. Despite a margin of 7 million votes over Trump, Biden’s victory had to endure Trump’s attempted coup on January 6. Within Congress, a single democratic senator, Joe Manchin, among 50 in the new majority (when combined with the democratic Vice President Harris), worked in harmony with republicans to negate the power of his party’s majority status.
On September 2, 2021 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York slammed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia after he came out against the price tag of a $3.5 trillion social spending bill and urged Democrats to slow down its passage.
The “fossil fuel” bill she is referring to appears to be the $1 trillion infrastructure bill focused on roads, bridges, and broadband that cleared the Senate in July with the backing of every Democratic senator and some Senate Republicans like Mitch McConnell.
AOC Tears Into Manchin Suggestion to ‘Pause’ $3.5 Trillion Bill (insider.com)
Joe Biden signs $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law | News | DW | 15.11.2021
News networks saw a significant drop in viewership in 2021, according to Nielsen, after many networks drew bigger audiences the previous year amid the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 presidential election, among other big stories.
The drop in viewership this year was larger among cable news networks, with a 38 percent drop in weekday prime-time viewership for CNN, 34 percent drop for Fox News Channel and 25 percent drop for MSNBC.
Network news channels fared somewhat better than their cable counterparts, with viewership at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” dropping by 12 percent each and viewership for NBC’s “Nightly News” dropping by 14 percent.Fox News was the most watched cable news channel for a sixth consecutive year, commanding 44 percent of the day audience and 47 percent of the primetime audience in 2021.
The number of unique visitors at The Washington Post’s website dropped by 44 percent in November compared to the previous year, around the time of the 2020 election, while it dropped by 34 percent at The New York Times.
Tobe Berkovitz, a political communications professor at Brown University, told Agence France-Presse earlier this year that “Trump was the goose that laid the golden egg and that was especially true for the cable networks and dominant newspapers.” He said that Biden, who he described as “boring,” does not provide the “drama” seen in the previous White House.
The professor suggested that viewers and readers needed “a break from the hysteria” and would likely turn away from news content in favor of scripted entertainment.