C-Span gets Pushy

Sixteen years after its founding in a suburban apartment building, C-SPAN (the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) pumps out 17,530 hours of public affairs programming annually. The basic C-SPAN channel, which covers the House of Representatives, is available to 63 million homes, while C-SPAN 2, covering the Senate, reaches 39 million. Both also carry call-in interview programs and a broad range of public-affairs coverage. Ready to be launched later this year, at first only in the Washington area, is C-SPAN 3, for congressional committee meetings and other events. Two more channels are planned, one for coverage of business and finance, and one for foreign governmental coverage. Viewer surveys have found that more than one American in four watched something on C-SPAN at least once last year. By its very existence, C-SPAN changes the way citizens perceive and react to politics.

Yet when its founder and chairman, Brian Lamb, interviewed Robert McNamara in April, the former secretary of defense asked, rather sheepishly, just what C-SPAN was. Despite growth and heightened profile, C-SPAN remains something of a mystery to many, even within its own regular audience. Misconceptions about its mission, function, and financing abound.

C-SPAN still inhabits a murky medial space between government and journalism. It exists as a public service, but it belongs to the profit-making cable industry. C-SPAN personnel identify themselves as journalists ("I have always considered myself first and foremost a journalist," says Lamb), yet their corporate mission statement specifically forswears "editing, commentary, or analysis."

The network strives to keep itself free of bias and eschews the cult of personality as well. Its on-camera personnel, led by Lamb himself, do not even speak their own names on the air; an overvoice as a program starts and a periodic superscript identify them. Lamb has discouraged the expression of personal political views even in off-camera newsroom bull sessions. Yet in recent months, he has been extraordinarily outspoken in his continuing efforts to gain greater access and control of coverage in Congress. He sees that as a crucial part of his larger mission: to reveal the capital city to the nation. Ultimately he wants to show not just the open hearings and news conferences but the Cabinet meetings, the congressional dealmaking sessions, and the negotiations backstage at the Supreme Court -- not to mention the editorial conferences of various newspapers and news bureaus.

Renowned for his mild-as-milk demeanor on camera, he becomes exercised when he talks about those who resist coverage, in government or outside. (He got the Radio-TV Correspondents' Association to permit live cameras at the group's annual dinner, and he has been trying for a decade to persuade the sixty journalists of the exclusive Gridiron Club to take the same step.) His goal is the video equivalent of Adolph Ochs's legendary admonition to his first editors at The New York Times: "I want it all."

Yet if what Lamb has fashioned at C-SPAN is a power base, it is like no other. It does not compete with anyone, because no one else does what C-SPAN does. It does not sponsor celebrity parties or prestige reception rooms at media dinners. Regarding itself more as a public service, it does not even market or promote its personalities.

If C-SPAN is like anything, it is most like Lamb himself. He is rarely seen at dinner parties, embassy receptions, or other events where contacts are forged or exploited. His salary, in the $200,000 range, suggests a college president more than a network chief executive. In person, he can be affable and engaging, but on camera he wears a mask of detachment -- the Rogerian therapist sitting silently by while callers share their feelings.

Partly because C-SPAN is like no other network, much of what people think they know about it turns out to be wrong. It is not, for example, an electronic elder-care center. Three-fourths of its audience is under fifty. "A lot of the call-in show participants are retired white males who sound pretty conservative," said Sarah Trahern, who was a spokeswoman and senior producer at C-SPAN until this summer, when she left for a job at The Nashville Network (TNN). "But the surveys show the demographics are pretty close to the country as a whole." The gender split is close to 50-50, for example, and the median household income of $40,000 is solidly middle class. About one-third of the viewers call themselves independents, and the rest are equally divided between the two major parties.

For his part, Lamb finds two other misconceptions particularly bothersome. One is that the network is either a government agency or at least partly dependent on public financing, like PBS or NPR. Lamb's sensitivity on this point is understandable, especially because some cable operators complain that they get little public-relations boost from sponsoring C-SPAN. That is why the words "funded entirely by America's cable television companies as a public service" appear alongside the corporate logo wherever possible -- on company signs, business cards, press kits, T-shirts, tote bags, and coffee mugs.

Lamb is galled most, though, by the assumption, shown in viewer surveys, that C-SPAN already controls the cameras that record House and Senate floor debates. In fact, the cameras are owned and operated by Congress, and the staff who control them are chosen by the members, responsible to no one else, and sharply limited in what they can show of the goings-on in either house. Lamb says the arrangement constitutes a serious deception in which C-SPAN is reluctantly complicit.

The setup goes back to the late 1970s, when Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. first agreed to let cameras in the House, provided that they be run by people working for him. He also insisted on gavel-to-gavel coverage of floor debates, with specific requirements: the cameras would show whoever was speaking, the presiding officer or, during votes, the well of the chamber. They were not to show the vote board, where hundreds of red and green lights indicate how each member has voted. They were not to pan the chamber -- a spacious auditorium where members often gather along the walls and aisles to talk, laugh, smoke, and strategize -- or mix in reaction shots of members who were not speaking.

The three broadcast networks then covering the Hill all refused to carry the feed on that basis, holding out for some arrangement that factored in their own news judgment.

That impasse created the opening for Lamb, who was then Washington bureau chief for the trade magazine Cablevision. A former UPI reporter and Navy press officer, Lamb had been trying for years to sell cable system operators on public affairs. With Congress as the anchor for the programming, they bought the idea. And Lamb, swallowing hard, accepted O'Neill's rules. "In the beginning it was the only way we could get in," he explains. He started with four employees, a makeshift studio, and a daytime link to 3.5 million households nationwide. He built his first studio set himself, and its C-SPAN sign sometimes fell down.

"I remember doing one of his first interview shows in 1980," says Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. "We sat in two straight-back chairs in this little apartment in Arlington and I said 'Brian, how many people are watching this?' And he said: 'About fourteen.' "

Now, at fifty-three, Lamb and the 200 employees of his personal invention work in a studio and offices in a prestige building that affords splendid views of the Capitol and its grounds. C-SPAN has a $24 million budget from the cable industry, which sees it as an inexpensive way to fill channels -- pennies per subscriber, usually as part of the basic cable package. The industry also gets at least a little favorable public relations for performing a public service. Viewership has risen dramatically over the last several years -- the estimated number of viewers has quadrupled since 1987 -- in part because of the increased attention paid to Congress in other media. But it could always be argued that those other media are paying more attention to Congress because of C-SPAN.

Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who has followed media and politics in Washington since the Eisenhower administration, views the cameras in Congress as a net plus. He says the initial concerns about show business cheapening House and Senate floor deliberations have not been borne out. "We have a few grandstanders and showboaters, but I don't think the floor is a less important place," he says. "If people are turned off by politics, I don't think cameras can take the blame. They're messengers, and pretty neutral ones at that."

In the 1980s, as it developed programming outside the halls of Congress, C-SPAN began sending camera crews to follow candidates, both congressional and presidential. The style was as low-key as the telecasts from Washington. There were long shots of would-be officeholders waiting for a chance to shake hands at a plant gate when the shifts changed. But there were also remarkable debates featuring candidates otherwise rarely seen on television. Other networks took a glance at an Iowa caucus; C-SPAN stayed until it was over.

C-SPAN has also upgraded the journalistic value it adds to the feed. Beginning in the House on swearing-in day, January 3, a new technical team began augmenting the feed not just by identifying the speakers but by describing the legislation in informational on-screen superscripts. The classical music tapes that had covered the sound of the chamber during these interludes have been replaced with the "natural sound" of the floor in the midst of a vote. Inset screens now play back key moments from the preceding debate (or from other events) during the "walking time" when members are coming to the floor and casting their votes. "We don't tell our audience what they are seeing while they are seeing it, but we will try to explain during breaks," says senior vice president Susan Swain, whose face, after Lamb's, may be the one most familiar to C-SPAN viewers.

The network has also gone on-line; users of the Internet can order for downloading copies of bills and biographies of individual members.

As for those cursed rules on covering floor debates, Lamb thought the new Republican tide would wash them away. After all, Newt Gingrich had embraced the cameras a decade earlier, making long speeches on C-SPAN after the rest of the House had gone home. "He used C-SPAN," says Hess, "to go after the Democrats, to put Congress into disrepute and to bring down a speaker" -- Jim Wright, who resigned in 1989 following allegations of ethical transgressions.

After the 1994 elections, Gingrich was calling for greater openness in the House, and on the Senate side, Majority Leader Bob Dole welcomed Lamb's ideas in a floor speech. "It seemed like a time to take them at their word," Lamb says.

Lamb had a shopping list ready: all committee meetings open to cameras, including hearings and the "mark up" sessions where members amend and vote on bills before floor debate; access to the conference committees where selected members of each chamber meet to thrash out the differences between the House and Senate versions of a bill; camera coverage of the speaker's morning chats with reporters and the "dugout chatter" between Senate leaders and the press; a camera set up just off the floor of each chamber for interviews with members arriving and departing.

Most of all, he wanted to control the camera coverage of floor debates. "The real motivation behind all this was to open up the last stop for legislation -- the floor of the House and Senate -- to journalistic cameras," Lamb says.

For a time, Lamb was seeing nothing but green lights -- cameras at Gingrich's daily briefing for reporters, a camera just off the floor, cameras allowed to pan the chamber and show reaction shots (but still controlled by House employees). With members warned in advance, the loosened rules were tried in late March during a racially charged debate over welfare reform. Then things started to fall apart. Members in both parties suddenly had reservations. Thirty-one Republicans signed a letter asking Gingrich to go back to showing whoever was speaking, period. Democrats were also leery, raising questions like these: What if the roving camera eye found a group of members smiling and joking in some part of the sprawling House chamber during a speech on a deadly serious subject? Or Democrats and Republicans quietly working together off to one side? Or members smoking cigarettes somewhere else?

Even those Lamb thought would be "okay with it" were "just the opposite," he says. "They started telling me all sorts of reasons it was a bad idea."

In May, peeved by reporter questions he regarded as "speeches," Gingrich decided he did not want cameras at his morning briefings after all and canceled the briefings altogether. Soon Dole, facing strong opposition to any change in coverage, deep-sixed his morning dugout sessions entirely. Some wide shots are still allowed in the House, but they are sharply restricted.

"When it comes to a politician's image, there's always a conflict between his desire to control it and the journalist's desire to portray it," says Lamb. "That's natural, it's been going on forever. And if there's not more public outcry or for that matter journalistic outcry from our colleagues in this business it's going to be easier and easier" to ban any cameras the politicians cannot control.

He has some support from broadcasters. "We clearly have an interest in what Brian has been trying to do," says Robin Sproul, ABC Washington bureau chief. "None of us think the general public is well served by the seven cameras as they are now operated" in the House. "You can't even tell if the chamber is empty or full, or whether anyone is paying any attention." Sproul describes the live House chamber as "a vital, interesting, fascinating place to be," adding: "We want that same feeling, and we don't get that now."

Barbara Cochran, Washington bureau chief for CBS, notes differences between Lamb's mission and those of broadcast news operations. "He's covering the Congress," she says, "whereas we have to cover the world." What she wants is the chance to get good camera shots on those special occasions when Congress makes the kind of news that will make network air. "We're interested in better access on a spot basis," she says, as was done this year for the State of the Union address. CBS provided pool coverage for the speech that was used by all the commercial news networks. One camera was allowed to move around on the floor, and among other things captured Gingrich making asides to staff people during the speech.

Sarah Trahern can produce countless quotations from journalists thanking C-SPAN for its contributions to campaign and congressional coverage. Yet now and again there arises the question:Is C-SPAN journalism? If an information service explicitly rejects editing and analyzing, can it be called, strictly speaking, a news organization?

The question has been raised even in the correspondents' galleries at the Capitol, where reporters place a high value on C-SPAN but sometimes wonder whether it is in their business or not. "Some have questioned whether C-SPAN should even be credentialed by the news galleries," notes Kenan Block, a producer for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and chairman of the Radio-TV Correspondents' Galleries.

Block has given the question some thought and settled on calling C-SPAN "journalism in the raw," with "a certain Zen quality."

"It's not adversarial," Block adds. "But their questions are often very compelling and insightful."

For some, Block's summary would amount to unleavened praise.

"Brian Lamb is trying to singlehandedly pull American journalism back to what it is supposed to be," says Jeremy Rosner, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace studying the media and congressional policy-making.

C-SPAN will never compete with 60 Minutes for pith and punch, but those who have wearied of the conventional broadcast news style often appreciate a long soak in its experiential reality. It has been called video veritŽ, a variant on the documentary film that points the camera at a subject without narration or comment. But the art of such films is in their editing, and C-SPAN generally edits little if at all. That difference eliminates the winnowing and directing that journalists generally regard as their contribution. C-SPAN is obviously the product of a thought process, but to some journalists, the process looks unfinished. They watch C-SPAN with frustration, wishing it would stretch and flex. Even if C-SPAN does not wish to comment on congressional works and personalities, why not at least try to sort Congress out? Why not rank its myriad events and bills by relative importance, explain what is at stake, point up patterns and trends? By nature, reporters and editors long for editorial value added, for summation that aspires to make sense of it a.

But Brian Lamb has found a remarkable degree of success by following his own instincts and style.

"They've brought a lot of people into the process, and they're bringing people an unfiltered view of what goes on," says Jack Nelson. "It may not really be journalism, but it's real communication. And it's communicating what government is really all about."

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