The Fatiguingly Lame Impeachment Hearings

Why are we supposed to care about the back-and-forth of unelected busybodies?

The big three networks have been dutifully airing the impeachment hearings since last week, but CBS’s move on Tuesday to truncate its coverage suggests that some TV executives are rethinking that decision. One can’t blame them. Watching congressional hacks pore over the back-and-forth of unelected busybodies is boring as hell. To say the impeachment hearings so far have been less than riveting is an understatement. And the viewing numbers bear that out: they are anemic compared to the huge viewership the Nixon impeachment hearings received. According to Business Insider, viewership of Schiff’s dull partisan exercise can’t even compete with recent events:

Though the major broadcast networks known as “The Big Three” and their cable news counterparts all aired the hearings live, they received significantly fewer views than other major recent congressional hearings.

In comparison, testimony from former FBI Director James Comey in June 2017 received 19.6 million live TV viewers, and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh received 20 million in September 2018.

Even Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, swung 16 million live TV viewers when he testified in February 2019.

The ultimate reason for the hearings’ lack of pizzazz is that no high crime exists, and hours and hours of probing won’t yield one. The Democrats look like Geraldo Rivera examining soda bottles after he told us he had found “Al Capone’s vaults.”