TV hearings won’t save the day

Here we go again, investing all kinds of hope and hype in public impeachment hearings before the House Intelligence Committee.

You would think, after the letdowns of the Brett Kavanaugh and Robert Mueller hearings, that we in the media would know better—that TV hearings don’t change the culture in a flash, as some media histories have been telling us for decades.

Public impeachment hearings are a very big moment in our nation’s life. I’ll be in front of several screens for every second of the hearings and surely way too engaged for the good of my mental health.

But that said, here’s a modest proposal: Let’s not get caught up in the false promise of a magical, transformative media moment and forget the real, daily, gritty, grind-it-out journalistic work it takes to get rid of someone elected to high office who proves dangerously unworthy of it.

In focusing all of our historical attention on a couple of TV moments, we overlook events like that of Sen. Margaret Chase Smith delivering a withering denunciation of the tactics used by Joe McCarthy and other members of her party in a speech titled “A Declaration of Conscience” on the floor of the Senate in 1950.

Or that of Vermont Sen. Ralph Flanders, another Republican, who also denounced McCarthy four years later.

Such important political moments are lost in narratives that overemphasize the role of media in watershed historical moments.

The Senate Watergate hearings on PBS in 1973 are being invoked regularly in connection with this week’s hearings, and there are some solid reasons for that.

They played a role in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The Watergate hearings, which began in May 1973, were hugely important. I watched the live hearings during the day and sometimes the reruns at night on PBS as an out-of-work graduate with a freshly minted degree.

They gave me the foundation of a political education I didn’t get in school.

But President Nixon didn’t resign until August 1974—a year later.

The TV hearings didn’t bring him down. The steady work of The Washington Post led by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did, along with some courageous members of Congress who signaled their willingness to vote for impeachment across party lines.

And yet, belief in the almighty power of TV hearings remains so strong that former PBS show host Bill Moyers took out a full-page ad in

The New York Times Friday urging PBS to not only carry the hearings live (as PBS is doing) but rerun them in prime time, just like 1973.

Except the fragmented media landscape of TV could hardly be more different than it was in 1973.

In our new digital media ecosystem, live TV hearings still matter. But they aren’t what they used to be in a predigital world. In fact, they never were what they are regularly remembered as being today.

So, by all means, watch the impeachment hearings.

Don’t miss a moment if you can help it. But don’t sit down in front of the screen expecting to be saved.