The Unlikely Birth and Growth of C-SPAN

Good morning. It’s March 20, the birthday of C-SPAN, the brainchild of the relentlessly non-partisan Brian Lamb, who formulated the idea when working in the late 1970s as Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine.

His original Big Idea – to get cameras on the floor of the House of Representatives – was simultaneously altruistic and business-minded. Remember, this was before CNN had launched its news programming; it was at a time when the three major networks cornered two-thirds of the television audience with their nightly news broadcasts.

Yet when Brian Lamb introduced his idea at an industry-wide conference, only one of the cable television executives present embraced it. He was cable pioneer Bob Rosencrans, who not only threw his weight behind the concept, but wrote a check for $25,000 to get it off the ground.

“Out of the 40 industry leaders, only Bob said he liked the idea,” Lamb recalled many years later, “and he got right behind it.”

Lamb himself proved to be one of those rare birds who is both a visionary and enough of a detail man to successfully implement his own idea. Partly, this came from his Midwest sensibilities, and his own family life. His mother was a religious woman who didn't drink or smoke, his father a no-nonsense Irish-American who managed only one year of college and who stressed hard work over blarney.

Lamb’s dad was a wholesake beer distributor who became intensely interested in politics, Lamb once recalled in an interview with San Diego Union TV writer Don Freeman, his main interest being legislation that kept “politicians’ hands out of the till.”

Ah, but then there was Brian Lamb’s grandfather. A natural showman, he owned and ran Lamb’s Place, a Lafayette, Ind., establishment that included illegal gambling in the backroom, and would sometimes put a glass of beer on his bald head and dance behind the bar.

Brian Lamb was enough like his father that he dutifully went to the local college, Purdue, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy after graduation. But he had enough of his grandfather in him to play drums in local bands as a teenager, and interview musicians in bands such as the Kingston Trio while still a high school journalism student.

Today, C-SPAN has grown into an institution of its own. Its cameras are in the House and the Senate, on the campaign trail, at university conferences, in presidential libraries, and busily airing oral histories of American presidents, documenting the influences of candidates who almost made it to the presidency, and showcasing the first ladies who did live in the White House where they served the American public without being paid a dime.

C-SPAN manages to do all this without injecting itself into the debate, despite coming to prominence at a time of relentlessly worsening political polarization. The signature C-SPAN imprint has been the deadpan interviewing style of book authors by Lamb himself.

It was a manner learned in the Heartland from a broadcasting teacher in Indiana named Bill Fraser, who taught students at Jefferson High School in Lafayette. One of those students was 15-year-old Brian Lamb.

“He taught me to interview the way I do it now,” Lamb told Don Freeman in 1989. “He taught me to stay the hell out of the way. Too many interviewers intrude too much. They want to be the main attraction. They use inflections. They raise their eyebrows as a way of expressing their opinion on what's been said. They try to make us think they're smarter than the person they're interviewing.”

Criticisms about raised eyebrows seem quaint today, in the wake of another, more dubious cable television innovation; i.e., the overtly partisan network.

But long before he sold one of them (Current TV) to Al Jazeera for some $500 million, Al Gore was a Tennessee congressman with a fascination for technology, TV, and innovation. And on March 19, 1979, he made the first speech televised from the House of Representatives.

Speaking to an audience that Lamb has joked “was in the dozens,” Gore stood in the well of the House and said, “The marriage of this medium and of our open debate have the potential, Mr. Speaker, to revitalize representative democracy.”