[deusofnull]

Of course they only wanted the senior flesh.

I'm not trying to dunk on Congress too hard, but so much of their public hearings are about the spectacle of gov officials holding "someone" accountable.

And it's bipartisan too, the spectacle.

The Dems were looking to further the Russia election manipulation spectacle, and I'd guess Repubs were hoping to advance their narratives of "shadowbanning" and ideological search results bias.

[DFHippie]

To be fair to Congress, their job is really to shape events in the public interest. Considering these hearings to be pure fact-finding is a category error. If they browbeat a celebrity, this shapes events in multiple ways: it affects fundraising, it affects the behavior of the individual browbeaten and those in this individual's orbit, it affects the public narrative, and if affects actions at the voting booth. And that is only the beginning. It is an extremely complicated game with numerous players and feedback loops. You can call it "grandstanding", as though it's purposeless and ineffectual, but obviously it isn't, and really this is their job. They want to speak to certain people because they calculate that this will give them leverage to shape events in a certain way.

This is how the sausage is made.

[deusofnull]

Certainly. One name for that for that entire phenomenon you're describing the functioning of is 'The Spectacle'.

I don't mean just the dictionary definition of spectacle, rather I'm referencing the Situationist + Critical Theory concept of The Spectacle. Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" is a wild piece of thought.

It's an absolute tome, but essentially society is now mediated by social relations of spectacle which are symbols / signs / abstractions of actual material relations. And like you're saying, politicians play a huge role in wielding spectacle towards their material goals. Some of this might seem strangely familiar / redundant but that just speaks to the impact Situationist thinking has had on our conception of society and culture.

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm