Look at the image, now gone viral, carefully.
A couple of senior citizens, listening intently to the Kavanaugh hearings.
Brett Kavanaugh, of course, is a jurist nominated to the Supreme Court by US President Donald Trump. Allegations of sexual assault years ago have thrown a spanner in the works for his candidature and the hearings in front of the Senate have drawn in massive viewership.
The emotional defence provided by Kavanaugh himself, and the heartfelt and well-articulated testimony of his accuser Dr Christine Blasey Ford made for some compelling viewership.
The human drama unfolding in front of us cut across many lines. First, there is the obvious Republican versus Democrat dynamic; then there are the faultines that have been opened up by the #MeToo movement.
Whereas one is fully aware of the sheer gravity of the situation, I would still like to come back to this image.
Though it went viral because it encapsulated how transfixed the American nation was by the entire episode, I would like to pivot again, because this is a media column, to the subject of how the media is consumed.
Armchair analysis of media evolution have been suggesting that the older readers hang on to print, while the youth consume it on digital media.
Well, what to speak of the written word, even audio-visual content is consumed through digital media by all age groups, including senior citizens.
The glorious revival of longform radio non-fiction (a golden age, this) is also not because of radio listening but podcasts.
Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry is no professor at Stanford, but he makes a good point when he says that we are living through the last 10,15 years of television and that government ad spend should reflect that.
