Audience formulates opinions right in the moment
A captivated national audience, many on social media, watched, commented and made up their own minds Thursday about Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court as the Senate Judiciary Committee senators sat in judgment.
When the day began, according to an NPR/PBS/Marist poll, a plurality of Americans hadn’t decided whether to believe Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of sexual assault when they were in high school.
Almost six in 10 people said they’d closely follow the confirmation proceeding. “Follow” still meant watch – a
screen is a screen, whether it fills your wall or fits in your hand – but it also meant reacting instantly, whether on Twitter to 10,000 followers or in the local hangout.
Danny Williams watched on an overhead TV at Utopia, a barbershop on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fort Myers, Florida. The hearing had been on all morning at the shop. Everyone there was watching and talking about it.
“Garbage” was Williams’ opinion of the proceeding. “They just charged Bill Cosby, didn’t they? Is this guy above the law?” he asked, referring to Kavanaugh. “They may think so, but I don’t.”
Williams found Ford credible. “She was sincere about what she was saying,” he said. “It’s just … look at the country. We have double standards. The country reflects its leader.”
At the other end of the nation, Don Caron, 63, a maker of political parody videos, sat in a coffee shop in Spokane, Washington, watching YouTube’s hearing feed on his laptop with big, padded headphones.
He described the experience as disturbing – and memorable.
A self-styled “progressive” who usually votes Democratic, Caron said he liked what he saw of Ford – “clearly not lying” – and disliked what he saw of the Republicans on the committee: “I don’t see how any good can come from this for Kavanaugh and the Republicans. … I’m realizing they don’t have any good moves.”
Students at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, watched the hearing on a large-screen TV set on the grassy lawn in front of a campus apartment building. One was Amy Cruz, 20, a junior majoring in women and gender studies.
“I wasn’t around or even conscious when Anita Hill was doing her statement,” Cruz said, referring to the woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court nomination hearings in 1991. “Watching this, I feel like everything is cyclical, and things are just repeating themselves.”
“Anita Hill was peppered with questions by a line of white men, and these people think it’s going to be different by hiring a woman to do the questioning instead, but there’s still a line of white men behind her,” Cruz said, referring to Rachel Mitchell, a lawyer working for the committee’s Republic senators. “It’s ridiculous.”
Kayla Santos, 21, a senior journalism major, said the university should do more to address sexual violence on campus. “If Brett Kavanough gets appointed even after all that’s been said, it would just be devastating,” she said. “It would be a wake-up call to get louder, protest and take more action.”
For some, the day brought back painful memories. A woman who identified herself as “Brenda from Missouri” called C-SPAN and said, “I’m a 76-year-old woman who was sexually molested in second grade. This brings back so much pain. Thought I was over it, but it’s not. You will never forget it. You get confused, and you don’t understand it, but you never forget.”
During previous congressional hearings, men such as CBS anchor Walter Cronkite would tell the nation, in the hours and days that followed, what was important. Thursday was 37 years since Cronkite last occupied the anchor chair, and Twitter, which has 68 million users in the USA, was exploding.
“We believe you, Dr. Ford,” @Krasstein tweeted. “This is what bravery looks like,” @duckofprey wrote.
Ford also had plenty of online critics. After she struggled with some dates, @DavidJLamb tweeted, “You can remember 30 years plus ago but can’t remember things in July of this year come on!”
There were some converts.
Jay Armstrong streamed Facebook’s coverage in Independence, Kentucky. “I’m no Democrat. I didn’t want it to be believable,” he wrote in the Greater Cincinnati Politics Facebook Group. But, he conceded, “she seems very believable to me. And the story is believable.”