Questioning CEOs serves the agenda of TikTok politicians

But in today’s political climate, playing the role of patsy for both the left and the right is now an even bigger part of the mix. Heightened partisanship and big business’s shifting relationship with Republicans has fostered an environment that is both hostile to industry as well as likelier to get CEOs caught in the crossfire of political aggrandizing. With politicians getting bigger payoffs for TikTok and Twitter exposure than law-making, we’re missing out on a chance to extract anything useful or revealing from influential businesspeople.

It’s an equation that has America Inc on edge. Companies are hiring lawyers and consultants to not only prep executives for testimony, but also to guide them on how best to respond to an influx of informal inquiries from legislators so that their CEOs don’t end up in hearing rooms to begin with.

Hearings take on more significance in a divided Congress. With little chance of much legislation getting passed, there are just not that many alternative forums where politicians can push their agendas and messages. For the right, that agenda is centred on its war on “wokeness” and corporations perceived as left-leaning. CEOs can no longer assume they have a pro-business ally in the hearing room who will lob softball questions their way. But it also means that they may well have an enemy: Republicans, once hesitant private-sector watchers, are now making corporations their targets.

Especially vulnerable to attacks from the right are companies vocal about their ESG efforts. Meanwhile, Big Tech is getting it from both sides—from Democrats with accusations of misinformation and from Republicans with cries of censorship of conservative speech. Companies doing business with China are also in the spotlight, with the newly formed House committee on ‘Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party’ launched under Republican leadership.

Much of the shift in tone has to do with the mechanics of Congress. Research from Jonathan Lewallen at the University of Tampa has shown that over the last 40 years, the proportion of hearings focused on legislation has dropped dramatically. Congressional committees overall are spending less time on legislation because they have little power to control it; it’s instead steered by party leadership.

Rather than act as a fact-finding tool for creating legislation, hearings are now more often what Lewallen calls “positional”— meaning all of the witnesses hold the same position or point of view. And fewer witnesses are being called overall, so less information is getting shared. His research also shows that hearings are no longer oriented toward problem solving: 71% of hearings in the early 1970s focused on solutions; 35 years later, that had dropped to around 30%.

What politicians, especially those who lack legislative power, seem to be doing instead of fact-finding is grandstanding. And they’re rewarded for it. Professor Ju Yeon Park at the University of Essex used a data-set of 12,820 House committee hearing transcripts from the 105th to 114th Congress to find that when politicians increase their grandstanding, they also increase their votes. Not surprisingly but depressingly —involvement in passing actual legislation doesn’t seem to have an impact on their re-election.

Park also discovered that the more voters are exposed to the grandstanding, the stronger the effect. That incentivizes members of Congress to say or do something that will garner mainstream or social media attention, no matter how unmoored it might be from reality or the facts.

Another way to grab eyeballs, of course, is to call in that high-profile CEO, who has been advised to take the opposite approach: make bad TV by providing testimony that’s as short or as boring as possible, or, better yet, both. That’s hard to achieve for even the most practised executive when politicians now have the ability to slice and dice hours of testimony to focus on the fragments that play best to their audiences. Chasing that viral moment means less substantial information on—or, for that matter, oversight of —some of America’s most powerful corporations.