Over 85% of Americans watched some portion of the hearings, which lasted for weeks. And, chances are, most of them watched on public television. In an age before CNN and the 24 hour television news cycle, your local PBS station, WETA broadcast all 250 hours of testimony and fed it to public television stations around the country. Many stations ran the coverage live and then rebroadcast it again at night. (After the first week of testimony, the three commercial networks returned to their normal programming and rotated daily coverage of the hearings.) Studio hosts Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer provided context and commentary from WETA's studio in Shirlington.
Television cameras covered the Watergate hearings gavel-to-gavel, from day one until 7 August. 319 hours of television were amassed, a record covering a single event. All three commercial television networks then in existence--NBC, CBS, and ABC--devoted an average of five hours per day covering the Watergate hearings for their first five days. The networks devised a rotation plan that, beginning on the hearing's sixth day, shifted coverage responsibility from one network to another every third day. Any of the three networks remained free to cover more of the hearings than required by their rotation agreement, but only once did the networks choose to exercise their option. All three networks elected to carry the nearly 30 hours of testimony by key witness and former White House counsel John Dean.
Watergate" is synonymous with a series of events that began with a botched burglary and ended with the resignation of a U.S. President. The term itself formally derives from the Watergate building in Washington, D.C., where, on the night of 17 June 1972, five burglars were arrested in the Democratic National Committee offices. Newspaper reports from that point began revealing bits and pieces of details that linked the Watergate burglars with President Richard Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. The president and his chief assistants denied involvement, but as evidence of White House complicity continued to grow, the U.S. Congress was compelled to investigate what role the Watergate matter might have played in subverting or attempting to subvert the electoral process.