The Monitor is a weekly column dedicated to everything that happens in the world of WIRED culture, from movies to memes, from television to Twitter.
Last night, a large portion of Americans tuned in to see how the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held a live audience on television. Brilliantly produced, it set forth facts about the insurrection that even those who religiously followed history did not know. It aired on no less than six channels (mostly not on Fox News) and became instant fodder for television broadcasts in the afternoon. (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired a special episode live after the hearing.) As it unfolded, though, I couldn’t help but think, in this age of too many screens, what people decide to watch.
Yes, people have been following the actions of the January 6 commission for almost 10 months. On Twitter, via cable, through news sites. But Thursday night’s broadcast looked different. The committee incorporated a former ABC news executive to produce the audiences and make them look less like a live C-SPAN channel. They intend, according to Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, to “tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power” from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. As for television politics, it lives up to Watergate audiences.
In other words, obligatory television. This is what the committee wanted, to give its conclusions to the court of public opinion. In a moment of misinformation, the goal is to train the eyes of the electorate to see clearly what has happened to democracy in the US. Surely not all of them succeeded. During the hearings, Fox directed Tucker Carlson’s ad-free program. And in the middle of it all, the attention was split between the TV and the smaller screen. Discussing politics is one of the many established pastimes of the social Internet, but it can often seem like there is more analysis and conversation than actual observation.
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site originates from.
I guess it’s the act of looking. In an essay a The New York Times this week, Kim Phuc Phan Thi, the woman known as “Napalm Girl” after her image was captured by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut during the Vietnam War, wrote that the photo often made her feel “ugly and embarrassed “. He noted that the United States does not normally see images of school shootings, such as last month in Uvalde, Texas, in the same way that it takes pictures of foreign wars. Doing so may seem “unbearable,” he wrote, “but we should face them.”
