The House January 6 select committee’s next hearing will largely focus on showing that former president Donald Trump knew he had legitimately lost the 2020 election when he began spreading the lies which culminated in the worst attack on the Capitol since 1814, but nonetheless mounted an extensive propaganda campaign to convince his supporters that he was the true victor.

       Monday’s hearing, the second of an expected six sessions this month, will zoom in on the role played by the news media in the run-up to the 6 January 2021 attack.

       One witness expected to appear is Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox News editor who lost his job in 2021 after he incurred the former president’s wrath for authorising the network to correctly project that Mr Trump would be the just the second-ever Republican to lose Arizona and the first since Bill Clinton carried the state in 1996.

       Mr Stirewalt, now an editor at the cable news channel NewsNation, told one of his own network’s anchors he would be testifying but said he was “not in a position now to tell you what my testimony will be about”.

       But Mr Trump’s reaction to his preferred television network calling the Grand Canyon State for Joe Biden foreshadowed how he would conduct himself for the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack.

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       According to multiple reports, Mr Trump and his inner circle became apoplectic upon hearing that Fox had called Arizona with just 73 per cent of the vote counted.

       Trump adviser Jason Miller immediately began to contradict Fox’s call on Twitter by accusing the network of being “a complete outlier” and accusing it of trying to “invalidate” Republican votes that had yet to be counted. He also demanded that the network retract the call in a series of phone calls with Fox executives.

       Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law and a senior adviser to Mr Trump, went so far as to press Fox owner Rupert Murdoch to order his employees to retract the call, but Mr Murdoch declined to do so.

       He later delivered a rant replete with the lies he continues to tell to this day in a 2.30 am appearance before supporters in the East Room, calling the election “a fraud on the American public”.

       “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win the election,” he added (he did not win the election).

       Representative Liz Cheney, the select committee’s vice-chair, previewed the panel’s next steps during her opening remarks on Thursday.

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       She told the approximately 20 million viewers watching on most major television networks that Mr Trump’s claims of fraud were “so frivolous and unsupported” that they caused his former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to lose his law license for offering them in court.

       “You will see that Donald Trump and his advisors knew that he had, in fact, lost the election,” Ms Cheney said. “But, despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information – to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him”.