An interview with Brian Lamb, founder and CEO of C-SPAN.
ER: How would you explain C-SPAN to someone who had never seen
it or heard of it?
Lamb: C-SPAN has as its mission the coverage of political events from
start to finish, which allows the viewer to make up his or her own
mind about what they think. Those events include the House and the
Senate of the United States, a couple of thousand hours a year of
Congressional hearings, National Press Club luncheon speeches,
political forums of all ideologies, political conventions, political
campaigns, debates. We call ourselves the political network of record.
There are two full-time, 24-hour-a-day television channels that are
transmitted via satellite, and the bulk of our audience receives them
through their cable television system. The name is an acronym--it
means Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network, and it comes from the
fact that when we started back in 1978 very few people in the
country knew that cable television had programming other than re-
transmission of distant signals.
ER: And how did you get it started?
Lamb: We started very slowly, and very small; and in the beginning
we cost very little money and therefore the expectation level was
very low. We started by carrying daily sessions of the House of
Representatives to about 3.5 million cable homes. With four
employees in the beginning, we grew and evolved literally on a day
by day, month to month basis until we grew to 200 employees and a
24 million dollar budget and two full time channels. We are not too
far away from having another three full-time channels, for a total of
five, in a package which we will call the C-SPAN Information Service,
which will include on-line services, two audio channels, five
television channels--all with the same mission: to let you see and
hear things for yourself and make up your own mind.
ER: Do you have any plans to expand beyond politics to education or
sociology or things that one doesn't normally think of as political?
Lamb: I doubt it. There are several different compartments of what
we do that might lend themselves to expansion--for instance, we do
a book show every Sunday night and there's probably a lot more
room for books on television--but how far we will take that at this
moment is really unknown.
ER: Do you receive any governmental funding?
Lamb: No, sir. Don't want it. Wouldn't take it.
ER: Why is that?
Lamb: Well, it's a deeply felt belief on my part and certainly others
here that taxpayer money and media do not go together--that it
works better in our society when the media and the government are
not working hand in glove. When you get money from a source, that
source has a certain proprietary interest, and I would just not be
comfortable getting any of our money from the government or from
the taxpayer.
ER: Are you supported pretty well by your arrangement with the
cable companies?
Lamb: I have always felt that the cable television industry gave us
the kind of support that this kind of an endeavor needed. C-SPAN is
never going to be a large audience deliverer. If it did deliver lots of
eyeballs to advertisers we could probably make a lot more money
than we have--if that were our mission. But it is a great luxury not to
have to deliver Nielson ratings.
ER: You don't make money at all, is that right?
Lamb: That's right. We could make money. We don't have to be a tax-
exempt organization. We chose to do it that way because we wanted
to be a genuine public service in spite of the fact that we are a
cooperative of the cable television industry.
ER: Do you get any donations from foundations and such?
Lamb: No.
ER: So you are strictly funded by the cable industry?
Lamb: Yes. We are supported by the cable television industry and
the money comes through the cable television industry from the
actual cable subscribers. So when you sit down every month and
write a check to your cable company we get five cents of that. It's a
partnership between the cable subscriber and the cable company.
There's nothing else like it in the American media, and it works for a
lot of different reasons. It wouldn't exist if the cable television
executives who sit on the C-SPAN board didn't start out by giving us
the kind of support they did.
ER: Would you ever consider covering politics on something less than
a gavel-to-gavel basis?
Lamb: Well, we do that now, but we really have no interest in
editing. We start with this premise: that whatever we cover should
be able to be seen by our audience in its entirety. Then, once in a
while, we will excerpt minutes of it in other programs. We now have
a program every day we call Washington Journal. But it's only there
to remind people that they can see the whole event. Or it is only
there to show a couple of minutes of something that happened as an
indication of what the rest of the event looked like. I don't really
have any interest in doing that and wouldn't do it if it weren't
necessary in this world we live in to periodically reduce things for
discussion purposes. C-SPAN is meant to give you the raw stuff and
let you make up your mind. That is really our only mission. That's
the reason, if we go to channels 3, 4 and 5, we will be able to do
more of this. There's plenty of room and plenty of opportunity and
plenty of people who are in the business of editing things down to
one-and-a-half-minute pieces and that's just never been of interest
to me.
ER: Back in the sixties, Newton Minow made that famous remark
about television being a "vast wasteland" Do you think it is still a
vast wasteland?
Lamb: No, it is not a wasteland, but there are a lot of people out there
who do nothing but make money out of it I think that's the great
disappointment--that the television medium probably hasn't done as
well as the print medium. The printing press has gotten a lot more
diversity and quality over the years. That's not entirely the
responsibility of the television medium. The government made a
huge mistake, in my opinion, in the early 1950's when it came up
with its allocations on who got channels and how few channels were
allocated. Had we started out with a multiplicity of channels as we
are now beginning to see with cable, we would have a lot better
television. They basically set this system up so it would appeal to the
lowest common denominator, and they turned over these channels to
people free of charge and required them to give nothing back to the
taxpayer in the way of money. The only requirement was that ten
percent of their programming be public affairs.
So these people who have the licenses were quite glad to give ten
percent back, shove it to the Sunday morning "ghetto area" and give
you an evening news broadcast of 15 minutes in the beginning and
later 30 minutes. They were taking billions away. And I think the
people who are at fault are not those in the television industry. They
are the government officials and elected officials who allowed it to
happen back in the '50s.
ER: What do you see the FCC doing to help you or obstruct you right
now?
Lamb: Well, I have a rather absolutist view of this. As far as I'm
concerned, the FCC should get out of the way, let competition flourish,
and stop trying to regulate every minute detail of this business,
because they can't do it. It's too big. It's too diverse. There are too
many different players. And in the end the more people that get into
this business the better off our country is. And the less regulation,
the better off we are because the marketplace will decide. There are
not enough people at the FCC to regulate this business.
ER: Could it be abolished?
Lamb: Oh, I don't know. The spectrum is still an allocation that has to
come from the FCC. As long as you have monopoly telephone service
in the local areas you are going to have to have some regulation. But,
you know, it is not very often that I see regulation of the cable
television industry that has paid off. C-SPAN's been hurt by the bill
that the Congress passed in 1992 and by the Federal Communications
Commission trying to carry out an obtuse law that nobody
understood while trying to satisfy the chairmen of the different
committees which were making a strong political statement. The way
they treated the cable television industry has not brought about
more television or better television. In fact, we probably got hurt
worse than any other network. We lost more subscribers, more
homes, than any other network. You've just got to sit back and ask
yourself: is this what is good for America? Everybody always talks
about television being a vast wasteland. Well, here is a network that
is supposedly doing a public service, and it gets hurt the worst by
the government when they come up with a new law and new
regulations. So, something is wrong.
ER: You're talking about the "must-carry" provision?
Lamb: A combination of the "must-carry" and "retransmission
consent." They are all so complicated that the average person quite
understandably can't figure out what they mean; and it was clear
that even regulators couldn't figure out what they mean. In the end,
the law supported the creation of networks that show reruns from
old television network shows while this network and others like it
were hurt. So you've just got to ask yourself constantly: what is the
purpose of all this so-called telecommunications reform?
ER: Just for the record, did you ever figure out what they mean, and
is there some way that in a sentence or two you could tell us what
they mean?
Lamb: It's very difficult. The "must-carry" law basically says cable
television systems must carry over-the-air television stations that
exist in the area of dominant influence adjacent to these cable
systems. It sounds like gobbledy-gook. In some states it means going
as far as 150 miles away to pick up a television station and bring it
on to the cable system. In other states it means, stations from 50
miles away. All it did was bring about places like Steubenville, Ohio
where they now have five public television stations, and three of
them aren't even in the state of Ohio. Constantly, in community after
community, these kinds of gerry-rigged operations were set up.
"Retransmission consent" basically gave local television stations the
option of requiring payment for carriage by those cable systems
either in money or in kind. Often an affiliate station would bargain
for the local cable station to carry a new channel that they would
create--like America's Talking or FX or Home and Garden Channel. I
could go on and on. So what did the government get out of it?
In many cases, we were hurt in the community with the requirement
that a new channel which no one ever asked for was then put on the
cable system to watch programs that were duplicative of what was
being done on other channels or other network reruns. So the price
was paid and it is hard to see where anybody gained diverse and
important television that they wouldn't have had if the government
had let the process evolve naturally instead of artificially. I mean, I
would like nothing more than to have somebody come back to me
and say, "You missed the point," or "You are obviously unaware that
this positive thing happened." But I have not had one person ever do
that, and no one I find is out there defending this law. You can't find
anybody that was the father of this law that stands up and says what
a great thing it is for America.
If it hadn't been for some stalwarts, some very good people who
made this network happen, we wouldn't be alive today. In the face of
the tremendous difficulty of raising money under this law, they
stuck by us, and we are going to be back in business and television is
going to change. And in spite of this law we are going to survive. But
I tell you, there were some grim moments in 1992 and 1994--those
are the two years--some very difficult days there.
ER: Speaking of difficult days, let me picture a scenario that you
would probably think was Dante's assignment in hell for you. The
scenario would be that Larry Tisch decided that you ought to be
president of CBS. What would you do with CBS?
Lamb: First of all, I wouldn't take the job.
ER: Now wait. You're in Dante's Hell. You have to take the job.
Lamb: I can't. I don't mean to avoid the questions, but I have no idea
what I'd do with CBS, because I have no interest in doing that. I
mean I purposely do what I do because I don't want to be the
operator of a commercial television network. I wouldn't do very well
at it, because the first thing I would say is, "we don't need to make
all that much money." Yet, if you're going to work for an organization
like that, you are driven to the bottom line, that's a responsible place
to be in American society. That's the way America works. You can't
blame the CBS, NBC and ABC executives because they want to make a
lot of money. No one has required that they do anything else. So if
you are at the top of one of those networks, and you have no
restrictions on you, and you've been given a license at no charge to
you--you go for broke.
The government years ago could have had it both ways if they had
opened this system up and allowed anybody to get into it. The only
way I can describe what I'm talking about is to say: look at the
printing press. If they had said, "You three humans in New York City
control everybody's access to the printing press," we'd have the same
thing with print. Anybody can get into the print game today. You can
go out and start your own newsletter--I did it myself. It's possible to
be heard in this society in print. It was this incredible artificial set of
regulations created years ago that made sure that this most powerful
medium of communication in history was controlled by very few
people that made it skewed like it is. I have no fault with what the
commercial television networks do. I don't watch a lot of it, but I
don't read a lot of magazines that people print. The point is they are
not the culprits in this game. If the government had wanted them to
do other things, it could have required them to do it. If the
government had wanted other television created they could have
taxed them and made them pay for the spectrum fee and set up a
fund. The people who have made decisions in government over the
years should take direct responsibility for the television system that
has been created. It didn't have to be this way.
ER: Does government impose any obligation on the cable industry
that requires it to have something like C-SPAN?
Lamb: Absolutely none.
ER: Then C-SPAN really is the great anomaly. Not only does it not
take any money from the government or anybody else, but it is
being done freely by a commercial enterprise, the cable industry.
Lamb: Not only is that an accurate statement, but almost no one ever
recognizes that fact--that these human beings who created C-SPAN
did it without being told to do it by the government, without being
regulated to do it by the government, without getting any direct
benefit out of it from the government. It is an anomaly, and, it is
proof that if you have an opportunity for diversity, people in this
country will support it. It is when this artificial system is set up that
people fight it. I mean, all through the years, commercial networks
fought some of the requirements because the government was telling
them they had to do it. They kept trying to get around them. If you'd
open this process wide open, you'd get Foreign Policy and Foreign
Affairs Magazine, you'd get Commentary and the New Republic, you'd
get the National Review and The Progressive, you'd get all of these--
the Atlantic. A lot of those magazines don't make a dime. But, people
figured out how to get into it--they aren't required to get into it.
They do it as a labor of love or an interest in ideology. The same
thing will be true, by the way, as this television medium is opened
up.
ER: Have you thought much about the convergence of cable television
with these other industries like the computer and communications
industries?
Lamb: We've thought about the convergence, and we're deeply
involved in it. We've been on America Online for almost a year and
we think it's a natural synergy. Every telephone company has been
in here negotiating contracts for the future for their own brand of
distribution of television. The direct satellite systems have all talked
to us about what we do. You know, it's going to be an interesting
future. The thing you don't know about is what we're all going to
look like ten years from now, who's going to be paying the bills,
under what mechanisms. Right now the cable industry is making
sure their corporate support keeps us going. But as the economics of
the business change, who knows what will happen? It is going to
change, though, and one of the best indicators of what is going to
change is what is happening with the three commercial networks.
Every week they lose audiences; and this past week, for instance,
they were at the lowest mark in their history for the number of
people watching television between 8 and 11 o'clock at night--prime
time. From 1975, when they had 95 percent of the audience, till
1995, it's dropped to 54 percent; they've lost 40 percent of the
audience in 20 years and it just keeps going down day after day.
Now, the smart network executives have gone on to buy and start
other networks, get involved in other networks. My guess is that
before it's over, CBS will be owned by a company that has lots of
other communications interests. They're going to survive as
companies; but these three commercial networks' audiences are
going to continue to go down. It's the most artificially created
audience for any form of communications in history.
ER: What is C-SPAN's main problem right now?
Lamb: Well, we're like anybody else. Our main issue is always where
is our money coming from, and how much is going to be there to
support our programs? The second issue is how do we improve the
product and how do we make it more consumer-valuable, and how
do we expand the service--because people are always wanting new
things--they're always wanting you to do more. So, any given day
when you walk through the door here, those are the two things we
are worried about the most. We don't have the problem that the
commercial networks have, which is that they've got to measure
their audience every quarter of an hour. But that's both a plus and a
minus for them. It's a plus because they always know where they
are. We're kind of in this never-never land. We've never lost
financial support from the cable industry for one second, but where
this is all going is, at the moment, up in the air. The revolution in
communications from the year 1995 to 2005 will be dramatically
more important than the one that came from 1975 to 1995. The next
ten years are going to totally upset the norm that people have been
used to. Nothing will be the same in the year 2005. It may be that
way in the year 2000. People will hardly ever have a shared
television experience. When it comes to television, they are going to
be living very individual lives as to what they watch and when they
watch it.
� 1995 Educom.<br>