James Goldston is a British-American journalist and television executive who most recently retired from a seven year stint as head of ABC News. He had been known for his revitalization of such shows as Nightline and Good Morning America. Earlier this year, the J6 Committee hired him to manage the hearings for a television audience. The stage craft you’ve been seeing is Goldston’s, and he deserves a great deal of credit for his work.
Here’s the Washington Post describing his on-the-fly recovery when Bill Stepien’s wife went into labor:
But just hours before Stepien was expected to testify, word reached the committee that he wouldn’t make it to Capitol Hill. His wife was about to have a baby.
Committee investigators rushed to the small room in the Cannon House Office Building where they have huddled during the hearings with a small production team. They were joined by a man in horn-rimmed glasses and a dark-blue plaid suit. He was James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, whom the committee tapped this spring, relatively late in their process, to help hone a clean, compelling, easy-to-follow structure to present the evidence they’ve collected from over 1,000 interviews and depositions.
The committee announced the day’s hearing would start late, and its staff got to work filling the programming void. An idea to have Stepien’s attorney deliver a statement on his behalf was considered and rejected. Instead, investigators decided to simply present excerpts of Stepien’s videotaped deposition, a compelling-enough story, as it turned out, with the campaign pro describing his dismay as Trump shunned his advice in favor of the wild election-fraud theories whispered to him by Rudy Giuliani and others.
It was Goldston who suggested that the Committee could weave snippets of testimony into coherent narratives. He pointed out that in many cases they had interviewed all of the participants in a given meeting, and that they could construct oral histories out of those snippets to tell the story. Though some Committee members thought Goldston’s presentation lackluster,
“it ended up hanging together so cohesively and so right,” said a person involved in the process, “and we haven’t overplayed anything.”
Even some of those interviewed expressed admiration for Goldston’s work. “Game respects game,” one said to the Post.
Imagine how things might be playing with a typical committee hearing on live television, and give a tip of the hat to Mr. Golston. His next gig, by the way, is a series entitled Kushner, Inc.