Must-read: Greenwald on the need for hearings

[lwcon]

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald makes a great point about where the Democrats should focus their efforts — televised hearings:

Hearings are able, in a dramatic and television-news-friendly environment, to shed light on how extreme and radical this administration really has been in all of these areas. More than trying to repeal the worst legislative abuses of the last Congress, hearings -- real and dramatic and probing -- were the real promise of electing Democrats to take over the Congress. It is time -- and it is beginning to be past the time -- for that to start in earnest.

You can't convince Americans of the need to stop abuses until you demonstrate to them in a dramatic and undeniable way that those absues are being perpetrated and that they are harmful and dangerous. Just as one example, FISA itself was enacted only after the Church Committee conducted a probing and aggressive investigation and exposed the decades of eavesdropping abuses on the part of the Executive branch, whereby all the heinous transgressions from J. Edgar Hoover's blackmail-motivated eavesdropping on Martin Luther King to the array of Nixonian surveillance excesses came to light in all of their unvarnished and ugly reality. Americans were not moved by abstract notions of privacy or checks and balances but by the real life anecdotes of abuses and the evidence demonstrating how widespread they were.

Also, for those who aren't old enough to remember the televised Watergate hearings, they took a country fool enough to re-elect Nixon by a landslide into an utter certainty that he had to be run out of town on a rail. As the Staple Singers sang back in the day, "Let's Do It Again!"

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[AValdoux]

1. Keyword - "televised"

If the hearings are only available on CSPAN3 no one sees them. If they are covered by MSM, they are in 2-minute sound bytes. For most people CSPAN3 is only available on the internet. You have to seek them out. The people who view them are already educated about the issues and they are singing to the choir. They will make a difference if a networks agree to televise them. Even one like MSNBC or CNN would make a difference.

[SemperEadem]

2. C-SPAN also puts their programming on the web

and they do pod casts. Something as big as a hearing would certainly be available on the web.

[lwcon]

3. Odds are they won't be generously covered on mainstream TV...

... unless they find there are compelling "smoking gun" stories in those sound-bites.

But getting the unindicted co-conspiritors testifying on camera provides the genuine hope of that coming to pass.