Reporters reflect on their experience covering the Jan. 6 insurrection

One year after the attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the façade of the institution may be repaired, but the internal scarring for journalists who covered those events is permanent.

When a journalist is assigned to cover the U.S. Congress, they are not anticipating the same kind of environment as a war-zone correspondent, but that’s exactly how the day looked for many on Jan. 6, 2021.  While the pandemic reduced the number of reporters physically in the building, there were still dozens covering the certification of the 2020 election results.

In Friday Reporter podcast conversations over the course of the last year, I had an opportunity to get a first-hand account from many of my colleagues who were in the building that day.  Paul Kane from The Washington Post shared an account from what he witnessed while sitting in the U.S. Senate gallery:

“I could see Secret Service motioning and [Vice President Mike] Pence getting up from his chair and moving.  And I knew right then that meant something bad was happening…We didn’t know where he went.  And then we could hear screaming and yelling and the sound of a baton clanging.  I just thought that the baton was the police actually starting to hit skulls of protestors…cause I had just thought that the Capitol was sort of indestructible.”