What Went Down On Day 1 Of The Impeachment Hearings

Observation about the bow tie:

What I’m watching for today won’t actually be something we can see on the broadcast: the number of Americans who actually tune in to watch. The hearings are being aired live on all three major networks, PBS, plus of course cable news, so the opportunity is there to capture a wide audience — or at least wider than watches your average congressional hearing! According to a CBS/YouGov poll, 20 percent of Americans say they plan to watch most of the hearings live, and an additional 21 percent say they plan to watch part of them live. And for comparison’s sake when the eventual number comes out, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing got 20.4 million viewers, while the Michael Cohen hearing got 15.9 million.

The whistleblower’s complaint that alleged the Trump administration pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate Trump’s political rivals has largely been corroborated by reporting by major news outlets, closed-door testimony from administration officials and, to some extent, comments by Trump and the White House. (NPR had a great story recently where it went line-by-line through the whistleblower complaint, showing where and how its core facts have been confirmed.)

So while today and Friday’s public impeachment hearings are newsworthy (the potential impeachment of a president is at stake), we’re not sure how much truly “new” stuff will actually emerge.

Part of my political reporter training tells me that things that happen in public matter — a moment goes viral, and maybe that changes the minds of lawmakers or voters in a way that a transcript or a news article can’t. But another part of my political reporter training tells me that Americans’ views of Trump are very stabilized and polarized, so it’s entirely possible that the hearings have little impact. For instance, conservative-leaning voters who don’t want to see the president removed from office — no matter the details of the Ukraine scandal — may not even tune into the hearings or watch media coverage of them.

These next few weeks will be complicated. There could be new revelations that make Trump look worse. Or perhaps congressional Republicans uncover details that raise real doubts about the narrative we have so far about how the administration was trying to force the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. Opinions, either from members of Congress or the public, could shift substantially with the public hearings. But I’m also taking heed of the view of press critic Dan Froomkin, who wrote last week, “There is also a distinct danger that many members of the traditional political media will set the bar so high for theatrics, zingy soundbites, and dramatic new revelations that even if the hearings succeed in laying out a ruinous case against the president, they will be judged a failure.”

The most likely outcome that the hearings confirm the basic outline of the Ukraine controversy as we understand it right now but don’t add much new information, and public opinion remains split on whether Trump should be removed from office. But that outcome, even if seems almost pre-ordained at this point, is still very, very important, as it keeps America on course for impeaching its president for only the third time in our nation’s history.