C-SPAN's Watergate Flashback

The echoes of the Watergate hearings more than 30 years ago were unmistakable when the House Judiciary Committee opened its own hearings last Friday on allegations that the White House obstructed justice and manipulated the media in making its case to invade Iraq.

And if you watched the hearings on C-SPAN, you might’ve wondered if the public-affairs network was trying to play up those parallels.

Just before the network began carrying the hearings on C-SPAN 3, the channel was rerunning a 1994 forum called Watergate: Corruption of American Politics.

With a House committee chairman (in this case, Michigan Democrat John Conyers) raising the specter of impeachment, and a former Republican White House official (in this case, former press secretary Scott McClellan) being sworn in for high-profile judiciary hearings, was C-SPAN trying to get cute?

No, said C-SPAN spokesman Peter Kiley—complete coincidence.

Kiley said the package of programming had been scheduled weeks ago. The hearing was scheduled for C-SPAN 2, but was moved to CSPAN 3 Thursday night because the Senate was in session.