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Melinda Arons, a former ‘Nightline’ senior producer, and former ABC News chief James Goldston produced the two shorts to remind party faithful of the stakes of the election.
By Rick Porter
Television Writer
The third night of the Democratic National Convention will feature a pair of videos produced by TV news veterans who also helped shape the narrative of the Jan. 6 committee hearings.
Melinda Arons, a former Nightline senior producer, Participant Media executive and Hillary Clinton campaign official, and former ABC News chief James Goldston produced the two shorts. One is meant to remind viewers of the horrific images of Jan. 6, 2021, and the other will make the case that Republican nominee Donald Trump is ready to repeat the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.
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The two videos are part of a theme of “A Fight for Our Freedoms” on the third night of the convention.
Goldston and Arons were tasked with helping make the House Select Committee on January 6’s case in a series of televised hearings in 2022. They and their team essentially built a TV operation within the halls of Congress, working with the committee’s investigators and lawyers to cull thousands of hours of footage from the Capitol riots to craft a compelling case that Trump and others in his administration had committed crimes that day.
Wednesday’s video won’t be building a legal argument but instead will serve to remind viewers and voters what that day was like. “We wanted to bring people back to the gut punch we all felt watching it unfold,” Arons told The Hollywood Reporter.
The second video will lay out the case that Trump is ready to repeat his “Stop the Steal” efforts from 2020 election, where he argued — unsuccessfully in all court challenges — that he lost only because of fraud. The short will serve as a call to action for get-out-the-vote efforts. It will reinforce a message that’s been repeated numerous times during the convention, that a potentially close election needs overwhelming turnout by Democrats.
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