C-SPAN's Brian Lamb, the Mr. Rogers of grownup TV, ought to be quite pleased with himself. He has convinced an industry leader notorious for crass consumer contempt to be, well, nice. At least for now.
 Since 1992 the founder and head of the nonprofit Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network has been waging a quiet campaign for space on the cable spectrum. The strategy has been discreet - as befits the architect of a channel known for calculatedly bland objectivity - but, with the support of a famously devoted viewership, it has grown increasingly insistent.

 Lamb's lament concerns access to the nation's TV sets. Since the passage of legislation in 1992 that placed new requirements on how cable companies allot their channel space, C-SPAN has suffered major disrespect from those companies - which had created the public affairs channel in the first place. Yet at the same time that the cable systems have been dropping or cutting back their carriage of the service, C-SPAN's reputation has shone ever brighter among viewers and scholars.

 Tom Oliphant, The Boston Globe's political columnist, calls it "one of the last outposts of civilized conversation." Edmund Lambeth, a University of Missouri professor who writes about ethics, says it's "a democratizing force for journalists who live in the hinterlands." And New York University professor Jay Rosen declares "C-SPAN is now our most important engine for producing a public record."

 Watching has become a nationwide habit. The eighteen-year-old C-SPAN1 channel (which features unedited coverage of the House floor, along with committee meetings, speeches, public conferences, and the occasional talk show) now is available around the clock to 70.4 million viewers, and C-SPAN2 (launched in 1986 with similar programming from the Senate) reaches 46.4 million. About 22 million viewers tune in weekly. They haven't been happy to see their habit forcibly curbed.
 Chicago-based reporter David Moberg, who writes about labor issues for a variety of magazines and newspapers, both regional and national, recalls his frustration when C-SPAN2 blinked off his screen. "I was writing about health care, and watching Senate health-care debates," he says. "Suddenly I was staring at a local gospel program. End of story."

 C-SPAN's travails reflect its precarious status as a charitable gesture of an industry in perennial need of an image transplant. Cable operators dreamed it up as a legislator-friendly service in 1979. The industry, in fact, got most of its wish list granted in the regulation-lite Cable Act of 1984. But in 1992, reacting to consumer outrage over rates and service, Congress passed reregulating legislation, including "must-carry" requirements.

 So cable companies, which until then had been free to pick and choose which and how many broadcast signals they offered viewers, are now required to offer up to a third of their space to local broadcasters. Since the remaining channel space tends to fill up quickly with the cable companies' own programming and lucrative services like home shopping, they often find it tempting - irresistibly so - to bump or shrink their carriage of C-SPAN. About eight million viewers have been cut, C-SPAN calculates, many of them subscribers to the country's largest cable company, TCI (Tele-Communications, Inc.).

 While Brian Lamb publicly bemoaned the evils of meddlesome regulation, outside observers noted that the new mandates weren't the only culprit. "There has never been a shortage of channel capacity," says public interest lawyer Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. "There has been a shortage of will to carry C-SPAN."

 Gradually C-SPAN regained about four million subscribers, adding some through cable's new rival service, direct broadcast satellite. But then in mid-1996 media magnate Rupert Murdoch offered TCI - whose stock price was then low - an unprecedented eleven dollars per subscriber to carry the Fox News Channel. TCI managers rearranged their schedules to make room for the moneymaker, and C-SPAN started falling off systems again.

 Angry viewers began organizing. Regina LaBelle, in Seattle, Washington, found out at her breakfast table that her TCI system was about to become one of forty-five systems in the area to chop or drop the service. "I said, I'm gonna write a letter, and my husband said, let's not stop there, let's start an organization." Her "Citizens for C-SPAN" now has a nationwide 200-name mailing list and contacts across the country. Viewers in Miami; Tucson; Buffalo; Vancouver, Washington; Rochester, Minnesota; and Riverside, California (all TCI systems) launched letter-writing and phone campaigns, some of which have been successful.

 Meanwhile, Brian Lamb was plaintively asking, in op-eds and articles in such strategically positioned outlets as The Washington Monthly, why C-SPAN was being punished for its success.

 Finally, on May 1, the new president of TCI, Leo Hindery - a longtime C-SPAN supporter and board member - pledged the company's full support for the programmer. He promised that TCI would carry both C-SPAN 1 and 2 on all its systems within three years, and pay C-SPAN a small monthly fee - now at six cents for each subscriber whether or not the household actually receives C-SPAN - for the next fifteen years.

 Aside from marking Hindery's personal devotion to C-SPAN, the decision also can be seen as a smart marketing move. "This offers an opportunity for TCI to rethink its relationship with its customers and communities," says Willard Rowland, who has dealt with TCI both as dean of the University of Colorado's journalism school and as chairman of a local public TV station.

 For LaBelle, the good news has been a "rallying point," encouraging the hope that Seattle might not only reinstate C-SPAN1 but get C-SPAN2. For activist Nancy Brataas, however, a former state senator in Rochester, Minnesota, the glass is only half full. "Do you know how long three years is when you're sixty-nine?" she said. And of course those on non-TCI systems still have no indication of future support - although TCI's clout might well encourage any waverers to follow its example.

 So for now, C-SPAN has moved back into cable's good graces. That, according to Brian Lamb, is the way it should be: industry choice, not a guaranteed berth through regulation. For one thing, technological change is unpredictable and rapid these days. Not only may digital compression create new space on tomorrow's cable systems, but the Internet - where you can already hear and see C-SPAN programming at www.c-span.org - may extend C-SPAN's reach in new ways.

 And then there is C-SPAN's ultimate defense: organized, politically savvy viewers.

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