American audiences love a police procedural. So, I’m all about broadcasting the one the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack is about to tee up.
The House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol is considering holding televised hearings during prime evening viewing hours so that the public can have “the best opportunity” to hear testimony and evaluate evidence, the panel’s chairman said.
“Maybe a series of hearings,” Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said Tuesday in an interview. “The public needs to know, needs to hear from people under oath about what led up to Jan. 6th, and to some degree, what has continued after Jan. 6.”
The hearings could occur in late March or early April, but no date has been set, Thompson added. “We’re working toward that.”
Airing dirty laundry is sometimes liberating. Sunshine, disinfectant, etc. And this disinfectant you don’t have to drink.
Per Wikipedia, the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings “were broadcast live during the day on commercial television; at the start, CBS, NBC, and ABC covered them simultaneously, and then later on a rotation basis, while PBS replayed the hearings at night. Some 319 hours were broadcast overall, and 85% of U.S. households watched some portion of them.”
I watched plenty. “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Nixon’s oleaginous henchmen: John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman. Whistleblower John Dean’s four days of gobsmacking testimony. Folksy committee chairman Sam Ervin (from just east of here) became a national star.
The 41 days of televised Iran-Contra hearings (1987) allowed America to see how the Reagan White House skirted Congress to conduct its private war in Central America funded with secret arms sales to Iran.
Since then, social and partisan media has allowed Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and men like Donald Trump to feed talking points and “alternative facts” directly into the brains of their partisans, essentially, dissolving external reality for a sizeable portion of the country.
Instead of lamenting America’s loss of a shared reality since, major networks broadcasting prime-time Jan. 6 hearings could help break through the alternative-facts bubble the right has worked so long and hard to construct. They might not change minds of Trump’s cult-like followers, but televised hearings could firmly establish for the country, the world, and for posterity whose reality is reality.
The country and the world would be better for it.