Not Watergate redux

THE capital city of the United States marked this month the 50-year anniversary of the event that ended up transforming American politics and the world of journalism: The break-in on June 17, 1972, of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate Office Building.

After the five perpetrators -- or “the plumbers” as they came to be known -- were arrested and their ties to the re-election campaign of then President Richard Nixon were uncovered, the press and Congress launched a broad investigation of the incident that exposed the White House’s involvement in the break-in. That led to a constitutional crisis that brought about the resignation of the president.

One reason that the Watergate scandal -- or just “Watergate” -- has been burned into the political memory of America and the world was that the US Senate established a special committee to look at the story behind the burglary, and that all its 51 sessions in 1973 were conducted in public and televised live gavel-to-gavel and then re-broadcast in the evening on public television.