How Three Editors Handle the Congressional Hearing Circus

Members of The Times’s Washington team discuss their approach to coverage of politicians and witnesses who sometimes seem to be performing for the cameras.

Congressional hearings seem made for TV. Executives whose companies are under fire or nominees for public office take an oath to tell the truth and settle in for hours of withering questions from lawmakers. To many at home, those questions and answers may sound more like speeches.

Last week brought three more contentious hearings. One featured Attorney General Pam Bondi and focused mostly on the Jeffrey Epstein files. The others, involving Homeland Security officials, explored immigration enforcement in Minnesota.

How does The New York Times approach covering hearings as news events? What happens when things don’t go as planned?

For answers to those questions, we turned to colleagues who frequently oversee hearing coverage: Margaret Ho, the Justice Department and fact-checking editor; Sandhya Somashekhar, a domestic policy editor; and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, the congressional editor. These are edited excerpts from our online conversation.