Of course, few people noticed Nixon’s attacks, because in 1970 few people watched public television. But when he vetoed a public television funding bill and his appointees to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting purged a slate of public affairs shows, the national media responded with outrage. One Los Angeles Times columnist accused Nixon of “lobotomizing this country’s broadcast media.” Journalist Robert MacNeil, himself a victim of the cuts, accused Nixon of wanting to silence “any attitude which does not indicate permanent genuflection before the wisdom and purity of Richard Milhous Nixon.”
This uproar provided the context in which Jim Karayn, head of the National Public Affairs Center for Television (NPACT) — the Washington office responsible for national news-related public programming — saw an opportunity. He persuaded PBS President Hartford Gunn that the service should cover the Watergate hearings. To Karayn, doing so was not just about “trying to drive one more nail into the ghost of Richard Nixon.” Rather, he thought that it would provide the public “insight into the basic workings of American government.”
In a poll, 52 percent of PBS member stations supported the plan. The hearings would be rebroadcast in full during prime-time hours. The anchor team of MacNeil and Jim Lehrer would discuss the day’s events with a “brain trust” of experts at the end of each broadcast. At the end of the first day, Lehrer offered viewers something of a mission statement: “We are running it all each day because we think these hearings are important, and because we think it is important that you get a chance to see the whole thing and make your own judgments. Some nights, we may be in competition with a late, late movie. We are doing this as an experiment, temporarily abandoning our ability to edit, to give you the whole story, however many hours it may take.”
Americans paid attention. NPACT received over 70,000 supportive letters from citizens. June Wilson of Atlanta wrote: “Since the Watergate gavel-to-gavel rebroadcast began, I have not sewed on a button, taken up a hem, or put the yogurt on to make, since I work during the day I would be hard pressed to keep up with the testimony and the nuances which undeniably show themselves in such a hearing. Thus I arrive red-eyed and sleepy to work now and don’t care.” Letters like this poured in from across the country, exploding the assumption that only Washington and New York cared about the proceedings.