The Watergate Hearings and Appointment Television

The watergate hearings became a block buster. The three t v networks traded off broadcasting them alive for up to six or seven hours a day. Soap operas like the young and the restless, in days of our lives, lost viewers as the hearings hit the top of the daytime. In an interview, one p b s executive thanked nixon for giving the network its best programming ever. At the end of the summer, a gallop pole found that 90 % of americans had tuned into at least some of the hearings.