An Urgent Legacy

The US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol hearings were the must-see TV of the summer of 2022. FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott argues that the hearings’ compositional form and ideological structures dramatized the differences between televisual liveness and live streaming (i.e., videos created, distributed, and received concurrently online). The Select Committee hearings affirmed television’s cultural significance: they upheld television as the medium for national conversations and, through their invocation of historic television formulas and ideologies of liveness, marked television as a legacy medium whose very datedness bestows a certain gravitas on its contents. In so doing, the hearings reasserted both the Select Committee’s power and the power of television.