Ford-Kavanaugh Senate Hearing To Blanket Bay Area Airwaves

PALO ALTO, CA – To sense the gravity of Thursday’s landmark U.S. Senate hearing with a Palo Alto psychology professor accusing a U.S. Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault, just turn to the airwaves and telecom channels.

Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of Brett M. Kavanaugh has sparked outrage from the women’s movement and her critics spanning from Ford’s Palo Alto home to the other end of the nation where the hearing comes to a crescendo in Washington, D.C. Palo Alto University, where Ford teaches, has hired a hotline service to answer the telephone. Her attorneys’ office staff has stopped picking up. The chartered plane with a banner of support for Ford that flew out of Hayward and hovered over Palo Alto about a week ago made more headlines.

All four major San Francisco Bay Area networks are breaking in to their regularly scheduled programming at 7 a.m. PST to air the open testimony between senators, speakers and the Republican Senate leadership guest – an Arizona litigator specializing in sex crimes.

One may wonder: “Who needs a soap opera?”

“We’re all going to be watching,” KGO Program Director Dave Salinger said Wednesday. The ABC Bay Area station will be joined by KPIX-CBS, KNTV-NBC and KICU, which is a sister channel to KTVU-Fox. KTVU will often break in, since staffers are expecting “riveting” coverage.

“This is a high profile hearing – live on television,” C-SPAN spokesman Howard Mortman told Patch. C-SPAN, which carries no ratings, will blanket its coverage tomorrow – using its television channel, radio application and web stream access.

Nielsen performs no predictions on program viewership. It’s like a publicly-traded company prematurely provided its balance sheet numbers.

But as a measure, Nielsen reported an estimated 45.6 million people tuned in to watch U.S. President Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union address on Jan. 30. There were 21 million total interactions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Almost half resided on Facebook, the social media giant out of Menlo Park.

The most social moment occurred at 7:04 p.m. PST with 68,000 interactions as viewers tweeted in the minutes following Trump announcing his four pillar plans on immigration reform.

The media has plastered this story of alleged sexual misconduct by a man who has the power to shape our world for decades to come. Every day, every minute leading up to the “he said, she said” testimony, the prospect of this confrontation for many has brought back those 27-year-old memories of Brandeis University professor Anita Hill accusing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is among them. On Thursday, she will sit front and center to the spectacle as a ranking member of the U.S. Sen. Judiciary Committee.

She called the rush to vote for the nominee the following day by her colleagues from across the aisle “outrageous,” and questioned the structure of the hearing for having “no investigation or other witnesses,” her spokeswoman Ashley Schapiti indicated.

“For any woman sharing an experience involving sexual assault – particularly when it involves a politically connected man with influence, authority and power – is extraordinarily difficult,” Feinstein said. “However, as we have seen over the past few days, (it) also (comes) at a price for the victim.”

--Images via Shutterstock, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein's Washington, D.C. office