Impeachment probe moving from closed sessions to televised hearings

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% of Americans tuned in to at least part of the Watergate telecasts. 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 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.

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,...