The first day of the proceedings in the Senate impeachment trial was a chaotic mess, and Mitch McConnell's plan to start at 1 PM Eastern and clog the airwaves with procedural fights long into the night, boring America into tuning out, was a total and complete success.
CBS blinked first.
After less than three hours of live coverage on Tuesday, the network of Walter Cronkite cut away from the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, yielding to daytime fare like “Dr. Phil” and “Judge Judy.”
NBC held out longer, but by 5 p.m., ABC was the last traditional broadcast network still in breaking-news mode. Die-hards could turn to cable news for their fix.
In television terms, the opening hours of Mr. Trump’s trial — only the third in American history, and the second of the mass-media era — did not exactly make for visually compelling viewing. For Republican Senate leadership, that was by design.
Senate officials rejected repeated requests to allow outside cameras into the chamber to record the trial — meaning that what viewers see and hear will be dictated by cameras and microphones controlled by Senate staff members, rather than an independent news organization. (Even C-SPAN was not allowed access.)
The result: Audiences were introduced on Tuesday to the constricted, lo-fi view of the Senate floor that will be ubiquitous on the nation’s TV screens in the coming days.
Election nights have their interactive maps and whiz-bang graphics. State of the Union coverage features high-definition reaction shots of senior government officials, generating the occasional iconic moment — think Justice Samuel Alito mouthing “Not true” when President Barack Obama criticized a Supreme Court opinion on campaign finance.
But the trial of a sitting president? On Tuesday, the small-screen vista was limited to artless shots of House impeachment managers and Mr. Trump’s lawyers at their lecterns, with an occasional overhead glimpse of the chamber thrown in.
Squint, and you may have been able to make out an individual senator or two.
The anchor Chris Wallace, commenting as part of Fox News’s analyst team, pointed out what viewers were missing.
“Because these are the government set of controlled cameras, we are only able to see the podium and who is speaking,” Mr. Wallace said on Tuesday. “We are not able to see what is the emotion, what is the state of consciousness of the members of the Senate as all this goes on at considerable length.”
MSNBC, whose prime-time opinion shows are a gathering space for liberals, acknowledged the restricted views with some subtle trolling. Attentive viewers might have noticed a graphic in the upper-left corner of the MSNBC screen, noting that the trial footage was provided by “Capitol Hill Senate TV”: the government, not a news outlet.
No drama, no emotion, no excitement, means no coverage, and the Senate GOP can then get away with no evidence, no witnesses, and basically no trial. For their part, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats fought tooth and nail, bringing up amendment after amendment to admit new evidence and to subpoena witnesses, but every one was defeated on the same 53-47 party line vote.
No evidence of any GOP senator being concerned about the cover-up at all.
Our country is being smothered in the middle of the night.
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