I happen to be old enough to remember (very fuzzily) the Ollie North Iran/Contra scandal of Ronald Reagan. I do remember that some of the hearings were switched over on broadcast TV channels, and that they did indeed "interrupt the soap operas" as it were.
Die-hard fans of soap operas would be livid when the networks would do this. TV had no other options for many people other than to be forced to watch political history unfold.
By the late 1990s, cable TV was a staple household technology. ( I was actually in a dorm at the time and so I was distracted by schoolwork, girlfriends, et cetera -- I didn't pay attention to politics whatsover.) I can say that I have no memory of ever seeing the actual impeachment trial of Bill Clinton in the senate. Ironically, youtube videos are the first time I have ever seen them. Chief justice Rehnquist presided there in a colorful robe. I find the videos to be surreal when I watch them.
In 2019 media technology has even transcended the 500+ channels of cable television, and gone on to streaming services. E.g. like netflix and hulu. The broadcast networks cannot interrupt "your regularly scheduled programming" because the broadcast networks can't interrupt anything at all in your consumption of media. I still have cable in my house here, but I can't even remember where the broadcast network channels are even located. I would have to use the menu to hunt them down. I would even surmise that the major networks are not even covering Trump impeachment-related stuff, perhaps feeling that CSPANs 1 , 2, and 3 and 24-hour news networks are perfectly sufficient for coverage.
Anyways, the older person I talked to (old enough to remember the impeachment of Nixon) said that the ability of people to tune out politics is greater than it has ever been in history.
My use of the verb "to tune out" there makes me sound like some older person. I'm certain that a millennial listening to me talk (or reading this) would pick up my use of antiquated lingo. In the age of Netflix, the power and control over media and its consumption is in the hands of the customer. I do feel like a person could got into a bubble far enough that they wouldn't know that war has broken out. So a little impeachment inquiry hearing is not even going to be a blip on their attention span.
You could hear about "some impeachment thing going on" that flips through the screen of your mobile phone like everything else that you flip through.
There is no front page of newspapers anymore.
There is no "major network channels" to interrupt to tell you that planes flew into towers.
All media is co-equal.
People's attention is saturated by 1000s of distractions.
There is a real danger of a Trump impeachment fizzling out into fuzzy obscurity -- forgotten in weeks as our attention is drawn to the next shiny thing. The "impeachment of Donald J Trump" (dun-dun-dun) will vanish off our media devices like one of those tropical depressions vanishing over the ocean, having never reached cat 1.
People seem to know about the impeachment of Nixon like they remember the Civil War. In 13 months, you will have to jog someone's memory with : "remember that one time when they tried to impeach Trump?"
