Rather than providing a catering service for the echo chambers, how might journalism address this important group?

(Never doubt that public opinion matters right now: In many ways, it’s what the hearings are all about, as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton both could have told you.)

Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin suggests the movie-trailer approach.

In a message, he explains: “Studios spend a $1 million or more on a trailer, because they know it’s essential to boil down the essentials of the film — explaining but not giving away the plot, providing a quick but intense insight into the characters, setting the scene with vivid imagery — to entice people to come back to the theatre a month later for the full movie.”

Similarly, most people (especially the less convinced or more persuadable) will never watch seven hours in a row of congressional testimony, but, as he notes, “many of them would be open to a targeted, well-informed ‘trailer’ approach that is cogently told.”

But that audience, although still substantial — more than 20 million people on average per night — certainly doesn’t include everyone. And far too often, those broadcasts fall prey to false equivalency: This side said this, and this side said that, and we don’t want to make anyone mad, so we’ve got to cut to a commercial now.

With that in mind, I would also very much like to see one other major change: a moratorium on the reflexive use of the word “partisan.”

Mainstream journalists love that word, because it lets them off the hook: We aren’t taking sides, not us! The country is divided, and we can’t help it.

Just uttering the word “partisan” is media Prozac: It soothes journalists’ angst about not being perceived as inoffensively neutral.

It’s too easy, and too often an easy coverup for, yes, epistemological nihilism: The notion that there are no facts, so let’s not bother to try establishing them.

But here’s the thing: There are facts. There is truth. We do live in a country that abides by laws and a Constitution, and nobody ought to be above them.

Despite the hardened positions, some members of the public are still uncertain. Some are persuadable, and yes, it matters.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the job of American journalism in this moment to get serious about trying to reach these citizens.