On Tuesday, Claremont McKenna College hosted a forum with three high-profile journalists — all of whom are alumni of the college — to share their experiences covering last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. The New York Times’ White House correspondent Michael Shear CM ’90 and NBC News’ senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur CM ’09 gave 5C students a personal perspective on what it was like to witness the Jan. 6 insurrection from the lens of a reporter. Held at CMC’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum and sponsored by the Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, the talk was moderated by Elise Viebeck CM ’10, a former journalist with The Washington Post. Seeking to uncover a more analytical view of the events, the panelists started by outlining the political context directly preceding the insurrection. To Shear, in the pre-Donald Trump era, “politics had a cadence that one could get used to; you can kind of understand the boundaries in which politics exists.” During the Trump administration, though, he found himself “exhausted by the craziness” of it all. Viebeck said that from the very beginning of the Trump administration, things were different. She recalled an incident in which a car was set on fire during the former president’s inauguration. Kapur also noted the 2020 U.S. presidential election was “unusual because of the massive expansion of mail-in and other means of polling.”