Last week, as the Watergate Scandal turned 50, the House January 6 Committee hearings in the US held the first three of seven planned televised hearings.
The hearings are broadly aimed at establishing how former US President Donald Trump and his circle of cronies engineered the events that led up to the failed insurrection on January 6, 2021
and pushed the 'big lie' that Joe Biden had illegally won the 2020 US Presidental Elections.
Though the seven hearings will fall well short of the 319 hours of primetime television the Watergate hearings received back in 1973,
they nevertheless promise to be a blockbuster showing in their own right.
Made for the social media age
As noted by many commentators, the hearings so far appear tailor-made for mass media, particularly social-media appeal. The narrative is short, effusive and powerful.
Televised testimonies from former Trump and ex-Vice President Pence's associates are interspersed with quick video cutaways and the testimonies themselves are angled to deliver hefty sound bites.
Take, for example, former Attorney General William Barr's assertion that Trump's claims of election fraud were "bogus, idiotic and bullshit" or a pre-eminent conservative judge
, J Micheal Lutting, saying that "Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy."