What Did You See?

Created
Sun, 05/01/2025 - 01:00
Updated
Sun, 05/01/2025 - 01:00
What will you see? Perhaps you noticed? C-Span operator swept their cameras about the U.S. House chamber on Friday during the vote to reelect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker. A huddle of white Republican men gathered here. A diverse cluster of Democractic women gathered for a selfie there. The cameras opened up the proceding, untethered from their normally fixed gaze. This is typical during a State of the Union Address but not House business as usual. Heather Cox Richardson took note in her Letters from an American substack: Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished. They did. Limiting what the public can can see of the House chamber will return soon enough. Limiting what you can see is already happening elsewhere. Over at The Washington Post, editors were deciding what their subscribers would see. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation after the opinions page rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting with a sack of money before a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. She’d worked at The Post for 16 years. Telnaes writes on her substack: I’ve worked for…