Brian Lamb and Susan Swain recount C-SPAN's 1979 origins, detailing how Al Gore's speech and FCC advocacy secured an RCA satellite despite AT&T opposition. Early hurdles included securing $25,000 corporate contributions and navigating Capitol Hill politics, with Senator Bob Byrd championing Senate access in 1986. The network survived the Madison Square Garden feed crisis by acquiring its own channel and maintained independence through a strict non-partisan mission, even during the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. Now under CEO Sam Altman, C-SPAN preserves its gavel-to-gavel legacy while expanding its video library, ensuring unbiased coverage of government proceedings remains intact. [Automatically generated summary]
This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.
unidentified
The hour to which the House will arrive.
Adjourned.
Having arrived, the House will be in order.
Prayer will be offered by the Reverend Chaplin.
Chair's Examiner General, the last day proceeding, announced the House's approval thereof.
Personal Clause 1 of Rural One, General Stands approved.
Gentleman from Tennessee.
As you now said, 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.
Trusting the Cameras00:16:01
unidentified
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.
I'm 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 love 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 communication.
unidentified
Were there one or two people that you connected with that actually unlocked it?
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.
We were on a satellite channel that we shared with Madison Square Garden, who had only nighttime events.
But they controlled it.
They owned it.
We had great, $100 an hour was our satellite time.
It was unbelievable.
And Kay Koppelvitz, who ran that organization and was in business with Bob Rosencrantz, 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 doing it, they were Graham Ladder was the bill, the budget bill.
And they were 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.
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.
unidentified
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, Carrie 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The Senate Story00:12:50
unidentified
So I want to go back to the Congress for a minute.
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.
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 hope this 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.
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.
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.
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.
He had worked over there.
He called each of the 100 senators, for or against or leaning.
And we put this thing out.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 this is, it just played out this way beautifully.
He called me up and he said, actually, his 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.
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.
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 take 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 a 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.
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?
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.
You know this.
You take money out of it and everything changes.
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.
Yeah, 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.
Voices from the Public00:14:20
unidentified
Sure.
But these operations were designed to be secrets from the American people.
Mr. Neals, 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.
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 Anita 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 the day out, of people that have different points of view 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.
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 in 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.
For those people that get it, it matters.
unidentified
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?
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.
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.
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 Yale's 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.
It drives people crazy, though.
unidentified
Beyond hearings and the House floor and the Senate floor and callers, C-SPAN has also done a lot of interviews over the years, including interviews with presidents.
Somebody said, you know, this is the greatest home court advantage that you could have in this office.
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.
I almost want to turn the question on you because I'm sure you've got stories.
Presidents are everybody pays attention to every interview you do with a president in this town.
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.
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.
The books in the back.
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.
2.10, no president.
No Bill Clinton.
2.20, no Bill Clinton.
2.30, no Bill Clinton.
And finally, about 25 minutes of two, of three, the Secret Service says he's on his way.
So I go out and meet him outside the Oval Office.
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.
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.
And they're in the room.
The press secretary's in the room.
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.
So I asked two more questions.
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 paint.
He didn't know what was going on.
I mean, I don't mean that negatively.
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.
I said, I'm out.
And so they all went.
They had their picture taken with him and all.
And I remember coming back to the studio saying, we just got shafted.
And so I said, we're not going to make a big deal out of this.
We're just going to run it as a part of a little documentary on the Oval Office.
So we turned it into something entirely different.
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, 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's story?
It's not in this group of clips, but it was in the last one.
It was the Mr. Lamb, 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 in the earlier show.
By the way, there's another interesting thing about this.
Ronald Reagan said to Joe Holmes, who is 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.
So they kept pushing it off, pushing it off.
And finally one day, this took a year, Ronald Reagan said to Joe Holmes, GD, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And any congressional staff members or reporters who live there could actually see what we were doing in the early days when the president could not.
unidentified
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?
And every week on Thursdays, Howard Mortman 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.
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 I 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.
unidentified
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.
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.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series.
Sunday, with our guest Hall of Fame baseball player and best-selling author Cal Ripken Jr., who has authored and co-authored more than a dozen books, including The Only Way I Know, Get in the Game, and a series of children's books.
He joins our host, civic leader, best-selling author, and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, David Rubenstein.
I thought writing kids' books were a good way to broach certain subjects that might have been tough when you were kids or whatever else in the backdrop of a travel team, travel baseball team, because we all worry about things as kids, and it was a way to communicate a good message through books.
So I just enjoyed the process.
unidentified
Watch America's Book Club with Cal Ripken Jr. Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
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C-SPAN takes you where decisions are made.
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C-SPAN is your unfiltered connection to American democracy.
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Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere.
It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about.
unidentified
Les did agree to the civility, all right?
He owes my son $10 from a bet.
I never paid for it.
Fork it over.
That's fighting words right there.
I'm glad I'm not in charge.
I'm thrilled to be on the show with him.
There are not shows like this, right?
Incentivizing that relationship.
Ceasefire, Friday nights on C-SPAN.
Bridging Political Divides00:00:22
unidentified
Here's how the Associated Press characterized this week's confirmation hearing for Homeland Security Secretary nominee Mark Wayne Mullen.
The Oklahoma Republican senator was selected by President Trump to replace Christy Noam.
Senator Mullen answered questions, some of them contentious, about his views on the mission of the department and reforms for immigration and customs enforcement.