| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, on this historic day, the House of Representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. | |
| Since March of 1979, C-SPAN has been your unfiltered window into American democracy, bringing you direct, no-spin coverage of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. | ||
| Is this Mr. Brian Lamb? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Would you hold one moment, please, for the president? | ||
| It exists because of C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb's vision and the cable industry's support, not government funding. | ||
| But this public service isn't guaranteed. | ||
| All this month, in honor of Founders Day, your support is more important than ever. | ||
| You can keep democracy unfiltered today and for future generations. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your gift today preserves open access to government and ensures the public stays informed. | |
| Donate now at c-span.org/slash donate or scan the code on your screen. | ||
| Every contribution matters. | ||
| The hour to which the House arrived, adjourned. | ||
| Having arrived, the House will be in order. | ||
| Prayer will be offered by the Reverend Chaplin. | ||
| Chair's Examiner General, last day proceeding, announced the House approval thereof. | ||
| So we want to clause one of Rural One. | ||
| General stands approved. | ||
| Gentleman from Tennessee. | ||
| As you can see, one minute, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| No objection. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, on this historic day, the House of Representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. | ||
| I wish to congratulate you for your courage in making this possible and the committee who has worked so hard under the leadership of Congressman Charles Rose to make this a reality. | ||
| Television will change this institution, Mr. Speaker, just as it has changed the executive branch. | ||
| But the good will far outweigh the bad. | ||
| That was then Representative Al Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, on March 19th, 1979, the date that C-SPAN first brought live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House of Representatives via cable television to homes across the country. | ||
| As we celebrate Founders Day here at C-SPAN, we're here with the founder, Brian Lamb, to tell us more about C-SPAN's origins and its growth. | ||
| And of course, joining us in that conversation, former C-SPAN CEO Susan Swain. | ||
| It is an honor to sit here with the two of you today. | ||
| Brian, let's just start with what inspired you to create C-SPAN. | ||
| Came from a small town, Indiana, Lafayette. | ||
| Had a great high school teacher in broadcasting, a great mentor at the local radio station, the guy that introduced me to television there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's, you know, these stories are so often told by people in this business. | |
| I love to hear them. | ||
| I just want to make sure that when I tell my own, that it's interesting enough to listen to. | ||
| But I moved to Washington and the Navy at the Pentagon for a couple years. | ||
| And you just notice that there's so much that happens in this town that nobody knows about. | ||
| And it just seemed at some point we ought to figure out a way to get more public affairs television to the public. | ||
| So what was the biggest challenge getting it off the ground? | ||
| Technology, money, and personal backing. | ||
| You know, you call me the founder of C-SPAN. | ||
| Actually one of 22 founders, because that was very important in the beginning to corral folks together, and they became a part of founding this institution and I loved that part of it because they were the ones that came up with the money, and it wasn't a lot of money, the most that any one company paid was $25,000 to start it. | ||
| And then the technology. | ||
| You've been in this business for a long time 33, four years. | ||
| It was the founding of the domestic satellite system that changed everything in this country when it comes to communications. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Were there one or two people that you connected with that actually unlocked it? | |
| I worked for a man named Tom Whitehead in the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the government for three and a half years. | ||
| He was brilliant. | ||
| He was an MIT graduate, Ph.D. | ||
| He was the guy responsible for pushing the FCC to launch domestic satellites and make it competitive. | ||
|
unidentified
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They were headed to giving it to one company, which so often happens, AT ⁇ T. | |
| And he said, no, no, no. | ||
| If you give it to one company, the cost to outsiders will be extraordinary. | ||
|
unidentified
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So he got it done, and we ended up going up on the RCA satellite. | |
| We went up in 79. | ||
| HBO went up in 75. | ||
| They were the first ones up there. | ||
| But that satellite is the whole technology change that mattered the most to us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Talk a little bit about the Congress part of it. | |
| How did you get Congress to agree? | ||
| There was a great two congressmen, one a Republican, one a Democrat, that were deeply involved in the very, very beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lionel Van Derlen from California, a Democrat, and he was an old broadcaster. | |
| And Bud Brown from Ohio, a Republican, he owned newspapers. | ||
| And both of those guys were on the communications subcommittee. | ||
| But Van Derlen at the time was the chairman. | ||
|
unidentified
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They knew this possibility right out of the box. | |
| And I was sitting in Lionel Van Derlen's office one day interviewing him for a cable magazine. | ||
|
unidentified
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And there was this little television set over there. | |
| I said, what's that? | ||
| And there was a line between it. | ||
| It turned out to be a close-circuit black and white version of what was going on on the floor of the House. | ||
| And it was closed circuit. | ||
| He could watch it. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I said, how's that happen? | |
| And he said, well, we've been experimenting with it for several months here. | ||
| And I said, wow, is there any chance that that'll ever be available to us, outsiders? | ||
| And he said, they're talking about it. | ||
| It could happen within the next couple years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he said, and I gave him some figures about the new satellite dishes and how small they were and how inexpensive they were. | |
| And he said to me, and I was a journalist, he says, could you write me a speech on that? | ||
| And I said, well, yeah, that's not really my role. | ||
| But let me think about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'll go back to my office. | |
| And I was working as a one-man band on cable vision magazine work, and I went back to my office. | ||
| This is a true story. | ||
| Two hours later, the phone rings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brian, Van, they're going to vote on this in another hour. | |
| Tell me all those statistics you were telling me about it. | ||
| And I gave them to him over the phone. | ||
| He walked on the floor. | ||
| He gave a very short speech, but laid it out saying, this will not end at the floor of the House. | ||
|
unidentified
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It will be sent to the satellite, and it can be sent into cable systems. | |
| We just saw the legendary speaker, Tip O'Neill, at the beginning of the program. | ||
| What was his take? | ||
| He took credit for it in his book, which is a good thing, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is very good. | ||
| There was another very important part of this process, a guy named Bob Schmidt. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Bob Schmidt ran the National Cable Television Association, and he was a big Democrat. | |
| And he was a big friend of Tips. | ||
| And he went to Tip and told him about this. | ||
| And Tip didn't know anything about technology. | ||
| He didn't care. | ||
|
unidentified
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He was a great, fun guy to know. | |
| I didn't know him. | ||
| And Bob said, I want you to go see him and tell him the story. | ||
| So I went to see Tip L'Neal. | ||
| And he was there with a great, great, great human being, Gary Himel, who worked for him. | ||
| And Gary was a godsend to us in the future. | ||
| And Tip L'Neal said, okay, I'll support you. | ||
| And it was all because, you know, it's like networking, connections. | ||
| You've lived that your whole life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Washington. | |
| That's how that happened. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Not long after Susan, 1981, you joined the network. | ||
| What? | ||
| 1982. | ||
| What was it like to work at this upstart network that not too many people had heard of? | ||
| Pretty crazy. | ||
| Really? | ||
| There were about 18, maybe 20 people here when I started. | ||
| When I started, we were just moving on to satellite. | ||
| You should tell the satellite story because we didn't have our own satellite. | ||
| We were sharing. | ||
| And when I came on board, we were moving until midnight. | ||
| And then eight months later or so in September of that year, we went to 24 hours on the satellite. | ||
| So I was brought on board to produce the primetime program. | ||
| And I was doing this with quote marks because what did we know of primetime? | ||
| There was no marketing of C-SPAN. | ||
| We didn't know how many homes we were really in. | ||
| I was in the control room with Craig Brownstein occasionally saying, Do you think anybody's watching this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| His mother was. | ||
| And mine too. | ||
| But it was so much fun. | ||
| I mean, really, we were working 18 hours a day. | ||
| You know, you'd go home and sleep and you'd come back the next day because there were so few of us and we were trying to put this whole network together. | ||
| Anyone who's ever, no matter what field they're in, had the energy of working on a startup will, this story will resonate with them because you work your tail off, but you're doing it in a collective good and you feel like you're really building something. | ||
| So it was a great deal of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long did it feel like it was a startup? | |
| Oh, until about 15 years ago, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, a long time. | |
| Yeah, honestly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A long time, yeah. | |
| Yeah, we were always knocking down doors and building new things. | ||
| So it had that air about it for a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I heard a story, and I don't know the details of it, that the House of Representatives was bounced from C-SPAN by a basketball game. | |
| Well, there's not a basketball game. | ||
| We were on a satellite channel that we shared with Madison Square Garden, who had only nighttime events. | ||
| But they controlled it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They owned it. | |
| We had great, it was $100 an hour was our satellite time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was unbelievable. | |
| And Kay Koppelvitz, who ran that organization and was in business with Bob Rosenkrantz, who had been our first chairman, one day said, there's the NBA, the draft. | ||
| The NBA draft's coming up, and we're going to cut you off. | ||
| And she did, and I laughed a long time about it. | ||
| I said, Kay, you know, this hurts. | ||
| they're going to cut us off so during that day when they were they were doing they were graham ladda was the bill was the budget bill And then we're all forget it. | ||
| And they were arguing that. | ||
| And I said, you couldn't hit us on a worse day because this is the money bill. | ||
| And so they knocked us off. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we knew we needed our own satellite channel where we couldn't get knocked off. | |
| And that was, of course, the next big step. | ||
| How did you hire people for this place called C-SPAN that no one had ever heard of? | ||
| Oh, I think mostly young people, honestly, walking in the door. | ||
| And really, one of the pipelines was Capitol Hill. | ||
| People who had been press secretaries or legislative assistants on Capitol Hill, not just because they knew us, but because they had a shared view of wanting the public to understand how Congress works. | ||
| We figured we could teach people the television part because our television is pretty straightforward. | ||
| And so a number of our early employees, I'm thinking about Lou Ketchum, Kerry Collins, and others, all came from press secretaries on Capitol Hill at one time, Bruce Collins or another. | ||
| So that was one pipeline. | ||
| I think the thing for us is when people walked in the door and said, I really want to work in television, they probably weren't going to be happy here because we're no whiz-bang, have never been whiz-bang. | ||
| And so we were really looking for people that wanted to do serious television and really cared about communicating what was happening in Washington. | ||
| So I think in the interview process, you can figure out people's real interests and motivations. | ||
| And we were just lucky. | ||
| We had so many people, how many? | ||
| 1,500 now that we've counted up? | ||
| 1,500 people over the years who have had a shared sense of the mission of this place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to talk about the mission for a second because my first day here, everybody talked about the mission. | |
| Have you read the mission? | ||
| Do you know what the mission is? | ||
| Talk a little bit about the mission, which it's literally posted on every wall of the C-SPAN headquarters. | ||
| Talk about the mission. | ||
| Where did it come from? | ||
| What was the idea? | ||
| Susan was responsible for getting the mission on paper. | ||
| So tell the story. | ||
| Oh, well, we felt like we needed to have one. | ||
| Again, not just to tell the world what we were doing, but also as a tool for people who worked here to keep your eye on the ball. | ||
| We're a nonprofit. | ||
| Every other place that you work in in a for-profit media, the mission's pretty clear. | ||
| How much revenue are you bringing in? | ||
| Is the advertiser base growing? | ||
| What are our goalposts? | ||
| So the mission became our goalpost. | ||
| And we formed a committee here that worked on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very Washington. | |
| Yes, Very Washington. | ||
| And we tried to hit, there's about five paragraphs in it, but we tried to hit all the important things. | ||
| The fact that we're committed to gavel-to-gavel coverage, the fact that we don't get in the way of what's happening of Washington or try to alter the point of view of the people that we're covering. | ||
| It's the straight story as it happens. | ||
| True journalism, we always thought. | ||
| And then really codified the importance of viewer interaction through the, at that point, call-in program. | ||
| But it was meant to be technology as it evolved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think a lot of people don't know that sometimes when they're watching C-SPAN, it's C-SPAN cameras. | |
| But when they're watching the House floor and the Senate floor, they're not C-SPAN cameras. | ||
| Does it matter? | ||
| I think it used to matter more than it does now only because the world has changed so drastically in the last 47 years. | ||
| It matters to me because when this whole place started, one of the things I felt very strongly about was that we wanted to be totally independent. | ||
|
unidentified
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We wanted the audience to trust us that the cameras were being controlled by us. | |
| And we tried in the very beginning to get the House of Representatives to allow us to put our cameras in. | ||
| There's a long story that I won't bore you with now, but it is really interesting what the members think about somebody outside bringing cameras in there. | ||
| They don't care about the hearing rooms, where really the most fun happens, but they do care about the floor of the House of Representatives. | ||
| So we have been taking their feed from the beginning, asking them every five years, let us put our cameras in. | ||
|
unidentified
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But almost everything else is our cameras. | |
| And we've told the audience that enough. | ||
| Members of Congress have no idea. | ||
| Members of Congress have no idea. | ||
| They think those are the C-SPAN cameras are the C-SPAN cameras. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're not our cameras. | |
| Yeah, I think it does matter, Sam. | ||
| But there's a practicality and reality aspect of Washington to it. | ||
| And I think anyone that's taking the time to watch this will remember one of our most high-profile events in the past several years was the vote on the speaker, where we had our own cameras in the chamber for that. | ||
|
unidentified
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14 votes for the speaker. | |
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And we were able to show the real drama on the faces, the small negotiations going off to the side, people on their cell phones texting to the president. | ||
| I mean, now that's a really significant event, and that's not the day in and day out. | ||
| But it does demonstrate when journalists are in the room, you see different things. | ||
| So, every Brian says every five years, but we had a history. | ||
| Every time there was a change in speakers, we would send another petition to put our own cameras in. | ||
| And they would form committees to study it. | ||
| We'd be brought up to testify on Capitol Hill. | ||
| You know how this works in Washington. | ||
| And it would always be, let's wait them out. | ||
| So they quit asking after a while. | ||
| So I think even in this age with you here, it's important for us to try as many times as we can to get our own cameras in the House and Senate chamber because we do see things there that they would prefer that you don't. | ||
| I mean, really, there's a lot of negotiations going off on the back of the floor when there's big, big votes on things. | ||
| And that is important because you're seeing people come together, which is what politics are all about. | ||
| And that static shot just doesn't capture that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was another day that C-SPAN's cameras were in the gallery, January 6th, 2021. | |
| Tell me a little bit about that day. | ||
| Oh, it was a tough day. | ||
| I think really, I mean, we didn't have any idea what was going on. | ||
| I mean, you can show the drama of that day when they were adjourning the House and sending the members to their safety. | ||
| We really didn't get much sense back here. | ||
| We're about two blocks away from the Capitol building, except through our own camera crews. | ||
| And we had camera crews that were outside, and we also had camera crews in Statuary Hall who had to be evacuated by the Capitol Hill police and sheltered in rooms with staff and members of Congress on that day until the challenge passed and their safety could be assured. | ||
| I have to say, as a manager, I was mostly concerned about the safety of the people who work here in the middle of all that. | ||
| That was a very scary day because that's your first priority when you manage people is make sure their health and safety is ensured. | ||
| But it was amazing to watch it unfold. | ||
| We also, in the parking garage here, shared the parking garage with a whole bunch of the protesters on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And I will remember leaving the building and there were lots and lots of cars going out with people that had just come from the rally and they were carrying their signs and still hyped up. | ||
| And there was just a day of so many small vignettes that will be forever burned in my brain about January 6th. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I want to go back to the Congress for a minute. | |
| And for seven years, the first seven years, C-SPAN only aired the House of Representatives. | ||
| But then C-SPAN got access to the Senate. | ||
| The Senate will come, Dawn. | ||
|
unidentified
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Today's historic in many ways. | |
| It's exciting in many ways. | ||
| I would guess that now the TV in the Senate is here, now that the public has an opportunity, and we underscore opportunity, I doubt that we'll ever be without television in the Senate. | ||
| I think today we, in effect, to sort of catch up with the 20th century. | ||
| We've been the invisible half of the Congress the past seven years. | ||
| Walk me through how you were able to get access to the stodgy United States Senate. | ||
| When it came to the Senate, that actually is an interesting story. | ||
| And Susan worked hard on this because we had a little newspaper. | ||
| And the Senate said, no, we're not going on television. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Howard Baker was the first one to drop a resolution when he became majority leader on the first day in 1981. | |
| And everybody said, no way, he wants to run for president. | ||
| We're not helping him. | ||
| So it was dead. | ||
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unidentified
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And there were really two or three major members of the House that were over my dead body, will there ever be television? | |
| And three of them, if I can think of all three of them, Russell Long, Bob Byrd, and there was one other. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| And we did this poll every year. | ||
| We decided to do a poll. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Mike Michelson, who was executive vice president here and a wonderful human being, long deceased, Mike got on the phone. | |
| He loved the Congress. | ||
|
unidentified
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He had worked over there. | |
| He called each of the 100 senators, for or against or leaning. | ||
| And we put this thing out. | ||
|
unidentified
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And every year the numbers went up a little bit. | |
| And one day I was sitting at my desk and Bob Byrd, senator from West Virginia, minority leader, not majority leader, called me and said, Brian, are these, I didn't even know him. | ||
| He said, Brian, are these figures in this poll you have accurate? | ||
|
unidentified
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I said, well, Senator, I don't know. | |
| We just called and people told us this. | ||
| And he said, will you come over and talk to me about this? | ||
| And I said, sure. | ||
| He'd been opposed. | ||
| Oh, vigorously opposed. | ||
| So I went over there and I sat in his dining room with him for two and a half hours. | ||
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unidentified
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And I didn't say a word. | |
| I got over there and I remember walking over there. | ||
| Mike Michelson liked to talk. | ||
| And I said, Mike, put a sock in it. | ||
| We're not, don't be talking. | ||
| We're just going to listen. | ||
| So we went in and sat and Bob Bird started out by saying, you know, something's happening. | ||
|
unidentified
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I went back to my state the other day and they introduced me as the Speaker of the House. | |
| And he said, I think they think because of my hair and Tip Bonneil's hair that I'm the Speaker of the House. | ||
| I don't think they understand. | ||
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unidentified
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And he said, then another thing, I was in a hotel and I turned on the set and there was Ceaseman on my set. | |
| And he said, do you let people speak that way all the time? | ||
| Can they finish their sentences and all that? | ||
|
unidentified
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I said, that's the whole reason we're in business. | |
| He said, well, I'm going to sponsor television in the Senate. | ||
| And I'm going to go to Russell Long. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm going to say, Russell, step aside. | |
| It's time. | ||
| And so he did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Russell Long stepped aside. | |
| He brought up the vote. | ||
|
unidentified
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Bob Doe was the majority leader and Bob Dole obviously was running for president too, but he just kept his mouth shut. | |
| He got the thing passed. | ||
| And it was interesting. | ||
| Some of the people that didn't, Dan Quayle, for instance, from my home state didn't vote for it. | ||
| I could never understand that one. | ||
| But it passed like 70 to 21, and we were in business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bob Byrd helped flip the switch. | |
| Totally. | ||
| And there's a reason for that that's very consistent. | ||
| Bob Byrd was an institutionalist till his dying day. | ||
| He loved the institution of the Senate. | ||
| And why he was against it, that he was concerned that television would shape or change the institution. | ||
| Why he ultimately flipped is that he saw it being subsumed to the House, that it was taking playing second fiddle to the House of Representatives. | ||
| And that was a sword in the heart for him. | ||
|
unidentified
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He wanted to protect his place. | |
| Exactly, protect the institution and its place within the public perception. | ||
| So I think that was very consistent in the end when he said that. | ||
| And he used it. | ||
| He would get on the floor and talk about Roman history. | ||
|
unidentified
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He could talk as long as he wanted to. | |
| And he loved it. | ||
|
unidentified
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And he talked and he talked and he talked and he talked. | |
| He used it more than anybody else. | ||
| And he then, you know, he became majority leader. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, it's really, he's a, he was an, and most people didn't pay attention to Bob Bird. | |
| He never appeared on the Sunday shows. | ||
| Nobody interviewed him very often. | ||
| But he was an institutionalist, like Susan said, and he's the one that made it happen. | ||
| One other coda to that story is that in 1981, when the Senate flipped hands and Senator Howard Baker became the majority leader, it was the first resolution he put in way back in 1981 to televise the House of Representatives. | ||
| Went down in flames excuse me, the Senate went down in flames, and it took five more years, 1986, when it finally went on campus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure the argument against it at the time, and even some now, is that the Senate or the House, they should be able to deliberate away from the cameras. | |
| What's your response to that? | ||
| Well, not only is that true, but the first day, John Glenn went on the floor of the House, Senate, and he had powder and a brush, and he started, you know, making a big thing out of that and kind of putting it down the whole floor on the floor. | ||
| On camera. | ||
| Made the evening news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that night, which this is really weird, that night, I hope Bennett Johnson won't hold this. | |
| I don't think, I don't know, is he alive, Bennett Johnson? | ||
| Senator Bennett Johnson? | ||
| I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it. | ||
| Well, that doesn't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He won't be mad about this. | |
| Anyway, I was invited on the PBS News Hour, and I went on, and I'm standing outside the studio, and I looked at Bennett Johnson standing right there, and I look up, and I said, oh, my God, he's painted his head black. | ||
| He wasn't as bald as I was, but he had put spray on his head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, Larry King used to do that all the time. | |
| But fill in the holes. | ||
| And so because he was on the floor of the Senate and he didn't want to look, you know, and it didn't last, thank goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He got over it. | |
| But that was one of my first indications of how serious they were taking the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, playing to the cameras, and then after a while, the novelty wore off. | ||
| And they just were themselves on the floor for the most part. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some people, a lot of people are surprised that C-SPAN doesn't receive any government funding. | |
| They just assume it's a public service. | ||
| It's a nonprofit must get some government funding. | ||
| Never thought about it? | ||
| Not only never thought about it, I would have never been involved in it. | ||
| I think it's a very bad idea to have a government institution fund media in any way. | ||
| I've always felt that way all my life. | ||
| And when I got involved in this, I said, no deal. | ||
| And the board, one of the things we haven't talked about is the cable television executives that really made this happen. | ||
| I mean, these were guys that stepped up and said, I love this idea. | ||
| And Bob Rosecrans won. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bob Tish is a guy that we never talk about. | |
| But he started way before everybody funding a little project called Cable Video where I went around and interviewed people in their offices with a tape recorder and a small camera. | ||
| But yeah, the idea, right out of the box, by the way, Sam, Congressman Charlie Rose called me. | ||
| And it just played out this way beautifully. | ||
| He called me up and he said, actually, Chief of Staff, come to my office and bring your mail with you. | ||
| And I said to the chief of staff, I said, uh-uh, I'm not bringing mail. | ||
| I tell you what I will do. | ||
| I'll bring mail and I'm taking the names off because people were writing us as an independent institution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I went over to see him, sitting in his office, and he said, well, I have an idea. | |
| I want to use our facilities over here to do a weekly program on C-SPAN at the end of the week to talk about the events of the week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I said, Mr. Congressman, there's a chance that we could do this, but you've got to have a Republican sitting on the other side. | |
| And he said, well, I don't know why. | ||
| I'll think about it. | ||
| Well, I knew what was going to happen. | ||
| He didn't want to do that. | ||
| But that was the first indication that I had that we, and I knew it was going to happen, that they were going to want to run the show. | ||
| And we had members of Congress, not members of our cable board, they didn't care. | ||
| Members of Congress wanted to tell us what to do, what hearings to cover. | ||
| And we were ready for that. | ||
| But if you're funded by them, then they think they can tell you what to do. | ||
| We're seeing great examples of what the government giveth, the government can takeh away. | ||
| And would you want to be sitting in appropriations hearings every year and defending why you sent your cameras to one hearing and didn't send them to another, being a political football with all that? | ||
| And the most important reason is public trust. | ||
| We never wanted the public to see this as a propaganda arm of the government. | ||
| It's done by private industry and people here who work for private industry, not for the government, making the editorial decisions. | ||
| That's important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So talk about the public trust for just a minute. | |
| C-SPAN is viewed really as the most non-partisan news and media outlet in America. | ||
| Talk about how you pulled that off and how you kept it that way, because particularly now, that's really unfortunately not the case anymore. | ||
| Well, the mission statement had a lot to do with it. | ||
| The fact that people here told you about it when you first came on board. | ||
| Everybody that works here is invested in it. | ||
| And from the get-go, people, when they're sitting in editorial meetings, they are aware of when we've put a point of view on, when we've covered a hearing from this side, and will purposely look for things that counterpoint to it. | ||
| We keep track of the guests on our call-in programs and where they fall in the political spectrum to make sure that we give voice to all sides. | ||
| I think it's the fact that you believe in this that makes it easy to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You just didn't give your views. | |
| Everybody that appeared on the, you know, do the call-in shows and the host just don't give your views. | ||
| It's not hard. | ||
| Everybody says, how do you do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said, it's easy. | |
| We split the lines, we hear from the right, the left, the up, the down. | ||
| What I think is not any more important than what the public thinks. | ||
| And it works. | ||
| And if you're in the business, first of all, you take money out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know this. | |
| You take money out of it and everything changes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In other words, if we were all stars and the harder, you know, the higher the ratings went, the higher the money went, then everything changes. | |
| Chemistry changes. | ||
| I know you, spending all those years with CNN, knew what it feeled like to walk into the place every day, and now you know what it feels like to walk in here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a very different feeling. | |
| It's a very different feeling. | ||
| And it is. | ||
| It's just, and we fit in. | ||
| We were early before any new television came to news and public affairs. | ||
| We came in March 19, 1979. | ||
| CNN came in June 1st, 1980. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And nothing like this had ever happened before. | |
| So everybody was kind of like, what is that? | ||
| Why would I watch that? | ||
| Except our board that realized that we were doing something unique. | ||
| It wasn't going to be terribly expensive. | ||
| And we were not going to be involved in politics other than to show events as they happen. | ||
| Now, when you take advertising and you take the money that you need that comes in with advertising off the table, and then the need to be a personality in order to track those eyeballs, the egos go out the door too. | ||
| There's really nothing here that is egocentric that's driving the place. | ||
| It's really just providing good information to the public that's the driver. | ||
| And that's what's kept it on the straight and narrow all these years, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we've talked a bit about the House floor and the Senate floor, but some of the most iconic moments on C-SPAN actually happened during congressional hearings. | |
| Let's take a look at a few of those. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But these operations were designed to be secrets from the American people. | ||
| Mr. Neils, I am at a loss as to how we could announce it to the American people and not have the Soviets know about it. | ||
| I have suggested that I was afraid of retaliation. | ||
| I was afraid of damage to my professional life. | ||
| And that's one of the things that I have come to understand about harassment, that this response, this kind of response, is not atypical. | ||
| I will not provide the rope for my own lynching or for further humiliation. | ||
| I am not going to engage in discussions, nor will I submit to roving questions of what goes on in the most intimate parts of my private life or the sanctity of my bedroom. | ||
| People have no use for this president. | ||
| None. | ||
| Zero, zip. | ||
| 82% of the people in one part of my district want to throw him out of office. | ||
| If I followed the polls, I could sit up here and rant and rave and become governor at home. | ||
| I don't want to be governor that way. | ||
| I want to be a good congressman who 30 years from now, not just 30 days from now, people thought did the right thing. | ||
| I liked beer. | ||
| I still like beer. | ||
| But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out. | ||
| And I never sexually assaulted anyone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's covered every major hearing in Congress, confirmation hearing and otherwise, over the last 40-something years. | |
| Any jump out at you as particularly memorable? | ||
| Obviously, they were important. | ||
| Yeah, a bunch. | ||
| But one that I'll never forget was, and I'm not going to get the exact institution. | ||
| There was a hearing on the House side where you had a chairman of, I think it's not the Atomic Energy Commission. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyway, he was the chairman and there were four members, both Democrats and Republicans, and they didn't like him. | |
| And they wanted to get rid of him as the chairman. | ||
| And right in front of your eyes, with the members coming down hard, they didn't like him either. | ||
| It's probably better off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just don't use his name. | |
| He's still around in this town, so is his wife. | ||
| She's on television. | ||
| But anyway, it was something to watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These four people come against him. | |
| And it was a hearing that no, CNN would never cover this hearing. | ||
| Neither would ABC NBC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This would not be one of them. | |
| But those kind of things happen all the time, and they happen when you least expect them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you have one? | |
| Oh, I'm not going to say one, but I mean, you had two clips of Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and I think over the decades, those have been the most significant that we've covered, the most important and most interesting to watch. | ||
| One of the reasons why is over that time, the, I'd say, the partisanship about Supreme Court nominations increased, increased, increased, and they became more and more tense, probably starting with the Clarence Thomas and Eda Hill hearings. | ||
| Do you remember the story that those went on for days and the networks actually pulled up and stopped televising them and we kept going? | ||
| Well, they didn't cover them until the Anita Hill thing. | ||
| And the other thing that people noticed is the way our cameras operate, we don't do the drama thing. | ||
| We don't, you know, coming in close like they did on Anita Hill. | ||
| And for a reason, because that just creates an unfair drama situation, good for television, but not honest for what's really going on in the room. | ||
| Can I tell you, with our camera crews, we actually had training sessions for all the camera crews. | ||
| We had a college professor, Dr. John Splain, who worked with us for years, who would teach the art of C-SPAN television to incoming camera crews. | ||
| And folks that have been around for a while would show the difference that Brian's talking about with the drama shot, the 60-minute shot where you're zeroing in on someone's eyes, versus our neutral shot, which is intended to show things as they really happen, as if you were sitting in the room. | ||
| So we take this hearing coverage pretty seriously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So covering hearings can run into the pledge to keep, to have gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House and Senate. | |
| How did you navigate that? | ||
| There have been a few instances where that's been really tough. | ||
| Technology has made it easier because in the early days we didn't have the internet. | ||
| Now we can stream hearings on our app or on the website and offer so many more choices. | ||
| But when we only had one or two television networks, it was often a problem. | ||
| I'm remembering a story actually when you mentioned the mission. | ||
| It was during the vote. | ||
| Brian, correct my details if they're wrong, but during the First Iraq War. | ||
| And there was a hearing going on that was on the Senate side, carried on C-SPAN 1, but it was critical to the decision about whether or not we were going to authorize the youth. | ||
| And the House was in special orders, and we had sort of telegraphed in advance that we would tape the special orders and carry the Senate hearing live. | ||
| Well, talk about clash between two bodies and the mission statement. | ||
| So Terry Murphy, who is our longtime wonderful vice president of programming, and I were called up to the Speaker's office. | ||
| And Sam, this was quite an event. | ||
| We had all of those aides around, and they had the mission statement in front, and they read that nothing shall interrupt gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House of Representatives. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| They caught it. | ||
| I mean, really, we stayed with the House and put the important hearing on later. | ||
| But that was a moment when you were thinking, darn, caught by, hoisted by our own batard, is that the expression? | ||
| There, because that our commitment to the House. | ||
| And sometimes it is painful. | ||
| I mean, now they don't do as many special order speeches, as they're called, as they used to in the old days. | ||
| But there would be times when there were hours on end when a single member would be on the floor for an hour long, one after the other, until 9 or 10 o'clock at night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every night. | |
| And we would be sitting back here with our whole evening planned, ready to go with all the things that we had covered that day that we thought were important for the public to see and couldn't get it on. | ||
| And our poor staff in the programming operations department and master control rewriting their programming schedules again and again and again because the House sessions with one member at a time were just dragging on for such a long time. | ||
| So there's been times when the commitment has been painful, but we've never walked away from it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A hallmark of C-SPAN since almost the very beginning has been viewer calls. | |
| Let's take a look at a few. | ||
| What's the name? | ||
| Yankton. | ||
| We have Yankton, South Dakota. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| You're on C-SPAN. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Okay, Memphis, thank you very much. | ||
| Let's go to Wichita Falls, Texas. | ||
| You're on C-SPAN. | ||
| The subject is television in the Senate. | ||
| Can you get a few calls from Louisiana this morning? | ||
| West Monroe, Louisiana. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're on the air. | |
| East Brunswick, New Jersey for Wolf Witzer. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
| It's time to hear from you and your reaction to last night's debate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Franklin, New Hampshire on the Independent line is first up. | |
| Good morning, caller. | ||
| Thanks, caller. | ||
| Tampa, Florida, Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| All right, Washington, one last time. | ||
| If he's there. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
| Hello, is this Mr. Brian Lamb? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Would you hold one moment, please, for the president? | ||
| I'm an entertainer. | ||
| Oh, what kind of entertaining? | ||
| Are you USO? | ||
| No, I actually was called by the USO, but I'm just an entertainer. | ||
| I really, I don't want to go much past that. | ||
| Is this Cher? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I'm from down south. | ||
| Oh, God's mom. | ||
| And I'm your mother. | ||
| And I disagree that all families are like ours. | ||
| I don't know many families that are fighting at Thanksgiving. | ||
| I was very glad that this Thanksgiving was a year that you two were supposed to go to your an-laws. | ||
| And I was hoping, and I'm hoping you'll have some of this out of your system when you come here for Christmas. | ||
| I'm a white male, and I am prejudiced. | ||
| And the reason it is, it's something I wasn't taught, but it's kind of something that I learned. | ||
| What can I do to change, you know, to be a better American? | ||
| Heather McGee. | ||
| Thank you so much for being honest and for opening up this conversation. | ||
| Either of you have a favorite call or caller? | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Well, first of all, how painful it is to work on television for 40 years to watch yourself age, right? | ||
| Especially the hair thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you look like a young pup in those aren't, not I. | |
| So I think those are some priceless moments. | ||
| And I actually, people that are longtime participants in the call-in program or viewers of the call-in program, I think what they cherish about it is hearing from so many voices around the country, the day in and day out, of people that have different points of view than that are willing to share them. | ||
| There's really nothing like it anywhere in the media where people from all points of view are willing to stake their claim on what they have to say and have a guest respond to it or have other callers. | ||
| I just heard one on the way in. | ||
| Two calls back, I heard a guy say something that I want to respond to. | ||
| I mean, that is a tremendous town hall that has been going on here for 45 years now that has been a very, very important part of what we do. | ||
| There's a story I want to tell you about because it really was meaningful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it goes back to about 1982 when we switched to a full satellite channel. | |
| There was a guy in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
New Jersey, Bud William Bud Harris was his name. | |
| And Bud, Susan and I both hosting, and so Bud would call all the time. | ||
| And Bud was kind of down the middle and always ask a very important question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And for some reason or other, I said, either he probably called me off Mike. | |
| And we started almost a daily conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I said, and Bud, what are we doing right? | |
| What are we doing wrong? | ||
| This is just a citizen. | ||
| I didn't know him. | ||
| So this went on for a very long time. | ||
| And we were headed towards switching satellites. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we knew we were going to run into trouble from some of our less committed cable operators. | |
| And there was a very large company at the time that's no longer in business. | ||
| And we rolled into the big change. | ||
| And that afternoon, before the change happened, Bud Harris called up and said, I want to start a Friends of C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he said, I'm going to give you my home number. | |
| And anybody in the audience can call me. | ||
| And I will take up your situation. | ||
| And we will work with your communities and all those things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One man band. | |
| He had retired. | ||
| He was 60 years old. | ||
| He had been an insurance guy. | ||
| He had a bad heart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he sat home and he took calls. | |
| And we had one company that dropped us from 400 different systems. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what they would do is create a citizens coalition in that town to call the cable operator and say, put it back on again. | ||
| It's better than that. | ||
| He'd call a local newspaper. | ||
| The New York Times owned 55 little communities in southern New Jersey. | ||
| And the New York Times let it know they were going to drop C-SPAN. | ||
| And Bud Harris called, he was up there in Cherry Hilly, called the Philadelphia Inquirer and got the media reporter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he said, you know, then the New York Times, the newspaper records, is going to drop C-SPAN, the network of record. | |
| And he called, Bud Harris called the president of the New York Times and said, why are you doing this? | ||
| This doesn't make any sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And 5.30 in the afternoon was the deadline. | |
| And right before 5.30 in the afternoon, the New York Times called the Philadelphia Enquirer and said, we're going to keep them on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if it literally hadn't been for the citizen Bud Harris, we would have not, the New York Times would have kicked us off. | |
| Thank you, Bud. | ||
| Yeah, no, Friends of C-SPAN was really very active for a long time. | ||
| And this was pre-social media days. | ||
| So this was a lot of letter writing and phone calling that was happening on their own initiative. | ||
| You know, Sam, when you go back to the very first question about how C-SPAN was founded, I always think about it as a coalition of the Congress saying yes to it, Brian and the cable industry providing the technology and the idea and the wherewithal to get it on board. | ||
| Journalists in those early days who wrote about it, which was really important, and who would come on the call-in shows, even when it wasn't seen in the District of Columbia, so they weren't really sure where they were going to be seen. | ||
| And also the viewers from the very, very beginning, viewers who were part of this and understood that it was important to them to preserve and expand what we were doing. | ||
| And I think that's so true today, even with the work that we're doing here with participants in the call-in program, how active our social media channels are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For those people that get it, it matters. | |
| So a question I get asked all the time, I'm going to pass along to you from our viewers. | ||
| When you have a really colorful viewer calling in, really colorful, how do you keep a straight face? | ||
| It's really easy. | ||
| I'm not one, and when I watch television, and I'm probably one of the worst, when I see, I don't care what channel they're on, and this didn't used to be what it is now. | ||
| Now it's everybody's on a side. | ||
| And it didn't used to be, but they play like they were not on a side. | ||
| And, you know, the eyebrow would go up. | ||
| You know what it's like. | ||
| You've watched it all your life. | ||
| I just decided that I didn't care. | ||
| I think citizens say the same thing. | ||
| You just don't care what they're saying to you. | ||
| You want to just hear what they say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And sometimes they sound like hayseeds because, hey, they're out there. | |
| And I don't mean that derogatorily. | ||
| I come from a state that had a lot of farmers and hayseeds in it. | ||
| And I was probably one myself. | ||
| So what? | ||
| You know, you may not have a college degree. | ||
| Most of the Americans don't. | ||
| And in this town, there's this bubble that we're all from the East, and we go to Yales and the Harvards and all that stuff. | ||
| And the West of this country isn't even close to that. | ||
| So we had an enormous amount of respect to hear what people were saying to us. | ||
| And the worst thing you could do was act like it mattered that you, you know, grimace because you didn't like what they had to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It drives people crazy, though. | |
| Beyond hearings and the House floor and the Senate floor and callers, C-SPAN's also done a lot of interviews over the years, including interviews with presidents. | ||
| Let's take a look. | ||
| The last two nights I was president, I never went over to the White House. | ||
| I stayed here in the Oval Office for three full days negotiating with the Ayatollah Khomeini through the Algerians to get the hostages released. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the inauguration morning at 10 o'clock, we had been completely successful. | |
| All the hostages were in an airplane at the end of the runway in Teheran, waiting to take off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I kept anticipating a message that they were free. | |
| But the Ayatollah didn't let the plane take off until about five minutes after I was no longer president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's very important for the president to be resolved during war. | |
| The truth of the matter is they were asking, did I make a mistake, for example, in the liberation of Iraq? | ||
| And the answer is, no, I didn't make a mistake in my judgment. | ||
| Somebody said, you know, this is the greatest home court advantage that you could have in this office. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I do think that people feel a certain reverence for the space because it symbolizes the presidency and it symbolizes what has been the extraordinary record of tough decisions, monumental decisions that have been made in this room. | |
| You get in and I say, what's the event of the day? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Who's calling? | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| And my life has been a pretty rapid, you know, I've seen a lot of changes, a lot of rapid changes. | ||
| I see it certainly in the White House. | ||
| You come in and everything is going great, and then you find out that there's a tremendous conflict with another nation. | ||
| You know, big stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How old is Sadie? | |
| Four and a half, five. | ||
| She was trained to be a great huntress, trained in England. | ||
| We haven't hunted her yet, but she's a great rabbit chaser. | ||
| Whoops, just a minute, Sadie. | ||
| And she's just the joy of Barbara's life and mine. | ||
| And she's fast as lightning, and she's a kind dog, and she makes friends easily. | ||
| Any favorite presidential interviews? | ||
| You saw that one, didn't you, Brian? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Any favorite or not favorite interviews with presidents? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I almost want to turn the question on you because I'm sure you've got stories that presidents are everybody pays attention to every interview you do with a president in this town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just, you know, they're all waiting for the headline. | |
| I would say that I've got one story. | ||
| It's a little bit longer than the Obama story is interesting, but the Clinton story, when we interviewed, we were allowed to go to Bill Clinton's Oval Office. | ||
| And the deal was we would have, he would mic him up outside. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He'd walk up and I would meet him out there and then walk into the Oval Office. | |
| And we'd walk around and talk about what was on the walls. | ||
| The paintings and the photos and all that stuff. | ||
| And the books in the back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I always thought that was fun. | |
| And we had an hour with him. | ||
| It was supposed to be at 2 o'clock. | ||
| So 2 o'clock came around. | ||
| We're all set up in the Oval Office, ready to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
2.10, no president. | |
| No Bill Clinton. | ||
| 2.20, no Bill Clinton. | ||
| 2.30, no Bill Clinton. | ||
| And finally, about 25 minutes of 3, the Secret Service says he's on his way. | ||
| So I go out and meet him outside the Oval Office. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm standing there waiting for him. | |
| And Bill Clinton comes, and Sox the Cat is there. | ||
| So he decides to play with Sox the Cat for a while. | ||
| Not terribly interested in what's next. | ||
| So we mic'd him up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then I walked in with him. | |
| And I walked around and he told us what things. | ||
| And I went over to his desk then, after 20 minutes, sat down. | ||
| And Garney Gehry, one of our former employees, great guy, was on the camera. | ||
| And I started asking him questions. | ||
| And about maybe two, three questions in. | ||
| And by the way, you know, Sam, what this is like. | ||
| There's always 15 staff people at the back of the Oval Office standing there saying, basically looking at you and saying, don't you dare ask him a nasty question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're in the room. | |
| The press secretary's in the room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dee D De Myers was there. | |
| And all of a sudden, Garney Gehry looks at me behind the camera and goes, and I said, what? | ||
| I've got 40 minutes left. | ||
| And so I decide I'm just going to keep going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I asked two more questions about that. | |
| And Garney goes, now, now. | ||
| And I realized what was happening. | ||
| He was late. | ||
| He was going to take our time away from us. | ||
| So what? | ||
| You don't matter. | ||
| And I just, I was so mad, I can still remember how I felt. | ||
| I unhooked my mic, and he didn't pay attention. | ||
| He didn't know what was going on. | ||
| I mean, I don't mean that negatively. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He didn't know the schedule problem. | |
| So I decided, I'm getting out of here. | ||
| I can't take this. | ||
| And so he starts saying, let's all have a picture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said, I'm out. | |
| And so they all went. | ||
| They had their picture taken with him and all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I remember coming back to the studio saying, we just got shafted. | |
| And so I said, we're not going to, we're not going to make a big deal out of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're just going to run it, you know, as a part of a little documentary on the Oval Office. | |
| So we turned it into something entirely different. | ||
| But you, playing with presidents is hazardous. | ||
| Yeah, there's always, not just about questions, but time, and they're always behind you going like this to the watch. | ||
| People that are watching home know, you're trying to do an interview that's as intimate as our conversation now, and there's 10 people that are watching you the whole time. | ||
| It's a very different dynamic than what you see on the TV. | ||
| May I tell one more president story? | ||
| It's not in this group of clips, but it was in the last one. | ||
| It was the, Mr. Blam, would you hold please for the president? | ||
| That was a series of interviews that we did with Ronald Reagan while he was in office called Students and Leaders. | ||
| And we took students from the Close-Up Foundation, which still exists in this town today, brings high school students into Washington for a Washington experience for a week. | ||
| But we were, and Brian can tell more detail about it, but through an old contact, had this idea of bringing students for one-on-one in the White House with the President of the United States, and they could ask any questions that they wanted. | ||
| And when the President went back, he was watching our television, our telecast of it on TV. | ||
| And we would do a call-in program with the students. | ||
| We'd tape over at the old executive office building, bring the kids back, put them all in the studio, and Brian would interview the students. | ||
| What was your experience like? | ||
| What did you think of the president's answer? | ||
| And Ronald Reagan was back in the White House watching this live telecast. | ||
| And at least two times, he called in because he wanted to have another shot at answering the students' questions. | ||
| And that was the hold please for the president call that you showed on the earlier show. | ||
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By the way, there's another interesting thing about this. | |
| Ronald Reagan said to Joe Holmes, who was one of his longtime aides, I want to do the kids' show that I used to do in California when I was governor on cable television. | ||
| And the rest of the staff didn't want him to do it. | ||
| Didn't want him to do it. | ||
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So they kept pushing it off, pushing it off. | |
| And finally, one day, this took a year, Ronald Reagan said to Joe Holmes, Gee De, I want to do those now. | ||
| So they came to us and we said, absolutely, we'd love to do them. | ||
| So there were 30-minute shows. | ||
| And he was really good with the students. | ||
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But the thing I want to mention is another factor in C-SPAN's history. | |
| Steve Janger started the Close-Up Foundation, which brought high school kids to town. | ||
| He was totally civic-oriented. | ||
| He was fantastic at it. | ||
| He's now deceased. | ||
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But if it wasn't for Steve Janger and Close-Up, we wouldn't have had our first two cameras. | |
| That's how this whole thing, this is a, I don't know, it's an erector set. | ||
| I say bailing wire and paperclips. | ||
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You can put us together in that. | |
| You just can't imagine how thrilling it was when I can remember driving up to New Jersey to get the first camera. | ||
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We were so excited. | |
| And Steve bought them and then let us use them all the time. | ||
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And then we would also do shows with the kids. | |
| Yeah, that's what you have to understand. | ||
| We were a television network with no cameras of our own because we picked up the signal of the House of Representatives in the very earliest days and put it on the satellite. | ||
| That's all we could do. | ||
| And Steve Janger, by buying those first cameras for C-SPAN and letting us use them to cover hearings, do call-in programs with them, really was the next step in our growth. | ||
| It was really important in the early days. | ||
| I have to say one quick thing. | ||
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Another fellow that we worked with who's extremely important to us is a guy named John Evans, who was on our board from the very beginning. | |
| John built the Arlington cable system. | ||
| And John and I were friends. | ||
| He and I both had been in the Navy. | ||
| And we were working together to try to get the television over to the Arlington cable system before we had the satellite. | ||
| And we went to this former congressman Charlie Rose, and we said we want to do it through the Metro, run a cable through the Metro. | ||
| And John was determined to do that. | ||
| Charlie Rose blocked that. | ||
| He didn't want us to have that ability. | ||
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And it's just astounding how hard some people worked for us and how other people in the system worked against us. | |
| The District of Columbia was one of the last major cities to get cable television service. | ||
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That's ironic. | |
| It's ironic. | ||
| So you had a situation where the president actually couldn't watch the Congress and people in the suburbs because of John Evans having Montgomery County and the Maryland suburbs and Arlington and the Virginia suburbs and had C-SPAN on the cable system meant any congressional staff members or reporters who lived there could actually see what we were doing in the early days when the president could not. | ||
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So C-SPAN has something beyond the coverage of the executive branch and the legislative branch. | |
| Book TV. | ||
| Interviewed a lot of authors. | ||
| Would you rather interview a historian, a president, or a nonfiction author? | ||
| Historian. | ||
| I'd much rather interview a historian. | ||
| I still do in the little podcast I do. | ||
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I love historians. | |
| They know something. | ||
| You cannot interview a historian without learning something. | ||
| You can interview politicians and not learn a thing. | ||
| A nonfiction author, a journalist is also very good, especially journalists that have a specialist subject or they have written a book themselves. | ||
| But historians are my favorite people. | ||
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They are so inquisitive and they have done so much work before that book comes out. | |
| Book TV has its earliest roots in the Vietnam War. | ||
| So do you want to explain why? | ||
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Neil Sheehan wrote a book called Bright Shining Lie, and it took him 16 years to write it. | |
| And he was very active with David Halberstam in Vietnam. | ||
| And they were doing some early reporting over there that the government didn't like. | ||
| And they were seeing things that the government didn't want the rest of the public to see. | ||
| And after the war was over, Neil wanted to write the definitive book. | ||
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And I realized that when his book was published, and it was a big book, that he'd get six minutes on the Today Show. | |
| And that would be it. | ||
| So I said to him, let us do five half-hour shows. | ||
| We'll put them on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. | ||
| And then on Friday, we'll have you sit and take calls. | ||
| That's how book television started. | ||
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And Susan had a lot to do with starting book television, book TV, as we call it, about books and all those different formats. | |
| But it was Neil Sheehan, which was the first interview that got us going. | ||
| What happened is when we did that call-in program on Friday, there were so many people wanting to participate. | ||
| And we said afterwards, hey, this book stuff has some legs. | ||
| So we really began to incorporate it more. | ||
| Our first was a little block called About Books that was about four hours long. | ||
| And then Brian was continuing to do his author interviews on a once-a-week basis. | ||
| And then later on, when C-SPAN 2, we were looking for ways to expand it. | ||
| We went to 48 hours, it was for many, many years of nonfiction book programming. | ||
| And it's been a really important part. | ||
| Our video library, which we haven't talked about and I know you will, has in it a compendium of every major nonfiction author for the past 35 years. | ||
| And that is a capsule of American history through their eyes that will be there for generations. | ||
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Library has 300,000 hours almost right now. | |
| Right. | ||
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It's a remarkable treasure. | |
| It is a remarkable treasure. | ||
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And every week on Thursdays, Howard Mortmer from this network does a little iPod podcast that uses the library that is both sometimes hilarious, other times very serious, but it's something that people ought to try out because people can use this library a lot more than they do, as you know, Sam. | |
| All these clips today came from the video library. | ||
| You need to mention Dr. Browning before you're going to talk about this. | ||
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Of course. | |
| Robert Browning, he's the genius that started the video library. | ||
| He's out at Purdue University. | ||
| And it's his baby. | ||
| And he's done a fantastic job with almost no staff. | ||
| He completely built it from the ground up. | ||
| He conceived it. | ||
| And he's taken it to 300,000 hours. | ||
| It's really quite an accomplishment. | ||
| Every single moment of C-SPAN coverage since September of 1987 has been preserved because of Dr. Browning and his team. | ||
| They're now C-SPAN employees who work in Indiana. | ||
| And another story of from the grassroots up, because in the early days, they were working with half-inch videotapes that they had to preserve. | ||
| They had a satellite dish and they'd bring it down and record it on videotapes and keep it on stacks in the library. | ||
| Now, of course, it's all digital. | ||
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Dr. Browning from Purdue, you went to Purdue, Brian. | |
| If you hadn't started C-SPAN in 1979, what do you think you would have done with your career? | ||
| I probably would have bought, I mean, with a lot of help, radio and television stations. | ||
| You know, I had some very good mentors right from that little town. | ||
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Dick Shively bought the local television station. | |
| I worked for him for a while. | ||
| He would have done anything. | ||
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He was very, very supportive. | |
| Henry Rosenthal, who owned the local radio station, he'd been a haberdasher. | ||
| And he loved the radio business. | ||
| And one day, when I was 17 years old, he looked at me and he said, you want to work here? | ||
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I'll pay you a dollar an hour. | |
| And this is kind of a nostalgic thing. | ||
| Henry in his late years worked for us at C-SPAN, and we were paying him about $1 an hour until he was 92 years old, and he never stopped working. | ||
| And then my broadcast teacher. | ||
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It was all radio all the time. | |
| I was in love, as so many people. | ||
| Sam, you've got your own story to tell. | ||
| You get in love with this business, and there's nothing like this business. | ||
| I know the public tends now, because there's been a lot of uproar over the years, to hate the media. | ||
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But if you're in the media, you love your work. | |
| And in most cases, people in the media are doing it for the right reasons. | ||
| What about you, Susan? | ||
| When you were in college, what was your plan? | ||
| Oh, it actually started earlier than that. | ||
| I used to come home, we had an afternoon paper in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Bulletin, and I would come home from school, lie on the floor in the living room, and turn the pages of the bulletin and read all the stories in there. | ||
| And in high school, I had a great, actually, English teacher who got us interested in comparative newspaper stories. | ||
| And that was really very important. | ||
| I went to college wanting to be in this business and worked at the local CBS affiliate. | ||
| I went to school in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and worked on the local CBS affiliate, and they had a radio station while I was going to school. | ||
| What turned the tide for me is about the time that I was graduating, local television news was really becoming much more happy talk. | ||
| And I knew I wanted to do serious work. | ||
| So I had a couple of other jobs in between, but I finally packed up my bags from Boston where I was living and moved here without a job, wanting to get into this business and do some serious journalism. | ||
| And I was very fortunate enough after about 10 months of interviewing all over town to meet Brian and the aforementioned Mike Michelson. | ||
| And I just knew I found my home as soon as I went through that interview. | ||
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Before we finish, I have to ask you both, any advice for the new guy? | |
| I'd like to turn it on you for a minute because I think the audience ought to know who you are and why you came here because you are the leader for hopefully the foreseeable future to take this place at a very important time. | ||
| And I just throw out a question to you. | ||
| Why'd you do this? | ||
| Why'd you come here as CEO? | ||
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I grew up watching C-SPAN. | |
| It's an American treasure that you all built. | ||
| I say outs only because it makes us feel all the time. | ||
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No, I literally lived in a little town in Connecticut that was one of those towns that didn't get broadcast TV very well from either New York or Hartford. | |
| And so cable came to that town mostly because of TV reception. | ||
| And one of the few channels that this little cable system had was C-SPAN. | ||
| I was a political junkie and I started watching C-SPAN. | ||
| And like many of our viewers, people watching right now, I hope, you fall in love with it. | ||
| You fall in love with the mission, the content. | ||
| And so I spent, you know, finished college, spent 30 years in network television. | ||
| But C-SPAN has always been a part of everything that any of us who work in Washington journalism think about. | ||
| And so when the two of you announced your retirement, the idea of coming to C-SPAN was, first of all, it was an easy decision because it's an amazing place that you've created. | ||
| Well, I should say to people that Sam was the bureau chief for CNN in Washington for many years before he applied for this job. | ||
| And each one of the Fox, CNN, and the three broadcast networks have bureau chiefs that are responsible for all their coverage decisions. | ||
| And we're all cooperative. | ||
| We trade off. | ||
| But sometimes we get into jams, I mean, with not being able to cover things. | ||
| And I think the audience should know that over the years, of all the bureau chiefs, you were always the one that said, how can I help? | ||
| How can I help you get what you need? | ||
| And was always very, very instrumental in trying to let us get our cameras into places where we couldn't. | ||
| So when we posted this position and we heard that you were interested, we were all really very happy about it because we understood that you got it. | ||
| And it was really important to us, and we haven't mentioned our very special, longtime colleague, Rob Kennedy, who was the co-CEO with me for many, many years. | ||
| When we were going through the interview process, it was very important for us that someone would not want to come into this place and knock it all down and build anew. | ||
| I mean, it needs to change with times changing, but there are basic tenets about this that are worth preserving. | ||
| And we understood that you got that. | ||
| And Rob Kennedy was an incredibly important part of this because he knew where every dollar was, and he had a structure. | ||
| And he squeezed every dollar. | ||
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I know. | |
| And it's just like Matt Dupre, who's taking his place and working with you now. | ||
| They just keyed to the place. | ||
| And the public never sees that. | ||
| But the public is so important to keeping this place going. | ||
| If we don't have the public, we're out of business. | ||
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100%. | |
| Well, on behalf of all of those viewers and the staff, past and present, thank you for what you've created. | ||
| Thank you for what you've built here at C-SPAN. | ||
| Well, happy anniversary. | ||
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This was a pleasure. | |
| Thank you, Sam. | ||
|
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Good to have you, Sam, running the show. | ||
|
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Thank you. | |
| It's great. | ||
| Thank you, Sam. | ||
|
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Mr. Speaker, on this historic day, the House of Representatives opens its proceedings for the first time to televised coverage. | |
| Since March of 1979, C-SPAN has been your unfiltered window into American democracy, bringing you direct, no-spin coverage of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. | ||
| Is this Mr. Brian Lamb? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Would you hold one moment, please, for the President? | ||
| It exists because of C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb's vision and the cable industry's support, not government funding. | ||
| But this public service isn't guaranteed. | ||
| All this month, in honor of Founders Day, your support is more important than ever. | ||
| You can keep democracy unfiltered today and for future generations. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
|
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Your gift today preserves open access to government and ensures the public stays informed. | |
| Donate now at c-SPAN.org slash donate or scan the code on your screen. | ||
| Every contribution matters. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Thursday, a panel discussion about U.S. defense strategy and spending amid shifting budget priorities from the Trump administration. | ||
| That's live from the Brookings Institution on C-SPAN. | ||
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