Back in 1973, tens of millions of Americans tuned in to what Variety called “the hottest daytime soap opera” — the Senate Watergate hearings that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
It was a communal experience, and by some estimates, more than 80 percent of Americans tuned in to at least part of the Watergate telecasts. They were offered by ABC, CBS and NBC, as well as PBS, which won acclaim and viewers by showing not only the live hearings but also the full-length replays in prime time.
Seeing the witnesses lay out the case against the president moved public opinion decidedly in favor of impeachment.
But this time may be different.
When the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump begins its public phase on Wednesday, people will be watching on screens large and small. Many, in fact, are likely to be watching the proceedings on more than one screen, with real-time reinforcement of their preexisting views of Trump on social media platforms and other venues that did not exist in Nixon’s time.
In the Watergate era, there was no Fox News or nationally prominent conservative talk radio shows, which today are favored by many of Trump’s supporters. Nor was there the equivalent of MSNBC, which caters to left-of-center partisans.
“People now have a far greater variety of options as to how to consume this,” said professor Tobe Berkovitz, a former political media consultant who teaches communications at Boston University.
“Everyone might watch the same hearing, but then people are going to divide into camps in terms of how they want to engage with the analysis,” he said. “You’re going to pick who you want to interpret and propagandize.”
Two decades before Watergate, Americans had their first collective immersion in live telecasts of a high-stakes Washington hearing when Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., polarized the country with his relentless pursuit of suspected communist sympathizers. Joseph Welch, a lawyer representing the Army, is remembered to this day for his question to McCarthy in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
The Watergate hearings produced a comparably memorable catchphrase, when Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., summarized the gist of the complex inquiry into a politically motivated break-in: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” A damning answer eventually surfaced after the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as the Senate’s Watergate Committee was officially called, obtained secret Oval Office tapes that implicated Nixon in a cover-up.
