Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day for May 17, 2017
The Number of the Day columns published on Ballotpedia reflect the views of the author.
May 17, 2017: The nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began 44 years ago today on May 17, 1973.[1]
The hearings played a vital role in leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. They took place several months after former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in the Watergate incident.
The sense of a growing crisis escalated just a few weeks before the hearings began when Nixon’s top White House staffers—H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—resigned over the scandal. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned, too, and White House counsel John Dean was fired.
Perhaps the most significant moment came a couple of months into the hearings when a former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield revealed that Nixon had secretly recorded all conversations and telephone calls in his offices.
It’s hard to imagine in today’s world, but 85 percent of all Americans watched at least some portion of the ongoing hearings.[1] That was possible because Americans in the 1970s had far fewer viewing options than are available today. Most households back then could only choose between three television networks and, perhaps, a public television station.
Hardly any media events today attract as large a following as the Watergate hearings. And, when they do, many more perspectives are available. In the 21st century, conservative media outlets exist to offer balance to liberal outlets, and just about every news story is vetted by family and friends on social media platforms.
As I note in my new book, Politics Has Failed: America Will Not, today’s decentralized media platforms stand in sharp contrast to the much more centralized messaging of American political dialogue in the ‘70s. Back then, 94 percent of all Americans watched one of the three major networks during prime time. Not only that, all television shows were routinely pre-empted when the president spoke, causing his speech to appear on every channel. The only way to avoid the president was to turn off the TV.
Without any competition, the president drew huge ratings. As a result, most Americans watched Nixon’s speeches live on topics including Watergate (56 percent).[2] Bounces in support for the president’s policies were normal in those days. When a politician and his speechwriters could lay out their case and present it without any opposing views, it was almost impossible not to win converts to their cause. This was such a powerful tool that Nixon gave 37 addresses from the Oval Office—an average of more than one for every two months he was in power.[3]
But, despite the power of mass-delivered public speeches, Nixon was undone by private tapes recorded in secret—tapes that were discovered almost by accident as a result of the Senate Watergate hearings.
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Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Boundary Stones, "40 Years Ago, TVs Tuned to Watergate Hearings," May 17, 2017
- ↑ Kernell, Samuel and Rice, Laurie. “Cable and the Partisan Polarization of the President’s Audience.” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 41, 4. (2011): 710.
- ↑ Richard Nixon, "Address to the Nation Announcing Decision To Resign the Office of President of the United States," August 8, 1974
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