Celebrating 45 years of C-SPAN

One day during the 94th Congress (1975-76), I had lunch with two lobbyists for the cable television industry, Brian Lamb and Robert L. Johnson. I was staffing for my boss, Rep. John B. Anderson (R-Ill.), the ranking minority member on the Rules Committee’s Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Broadcasting. Rep. B.F. "Bernie" Sisk (D-Calif.) chaired the subcommittee. His chief staffer was Tony Coelho, who would later succeed his boss as a member. 

The subcommittee had been charged with exploring alternative means of broadcasting House floor proceedings. Following years of hearings before various joint, select and standing committees in the early 1970s — all of which made strong cases for televising House and Senate sessions — the only remaining question was, “How best to do it?”   

The subcommittee’s deliberations alternated between either allowing the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) to televise House debates, or a network pool to cover the floor (such as is done for the president’s State of the Union addresses). As I recall, Lamb and Johnson were suggesting a variation on the PBS option — a new, cable network devoted to carrying live, gavel-to-gavel House floor sessions. 

The Rules subcommittee eventually came down on the side of the network pool. But it kept running into a brick wall with House Majority Leader Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. (D-Mass.), negotiating on behalf of Speaker Carl Albert (D-Okla.). With every objection O’Neill raised, the subcommittee responded with new tweaks and reports.  

The writing was clearly on the wall: The Democratic leadership did not want any kind of floor coverage if the cameras were being operated by anyone other than the House. Eventually, the subcommittee capitulated to the Speaker’s bottom-line demand that the clerk be charged with implementing the system and that all references to a network pool be stricken.   

Notwithstanding this significant concession, the leadership prevailed on the full Rules Committee to not report to the House the subcommittee’s revised resolution (H. Res. 875). On March 24, 1976, the Rules Committee voted nine to four to recommit the resolution to the subcommittee.   

In the subsequent 95th Congress (1977-78), O’Neill, the newly elected Speaker, surprised everyone by announcing early in the session that a 90-day trial of televising would be initiated using black and white security cameras. When that initiative proved successful, Rep. Gillis Long (D-La.), chairman of a Rules Subcommittee on Rules and Organization of the House, introduced a resolution (H. Res. 821) on Oct. 6, 1977, authorizing the Speaker to “devise and implement a system subject to his direction and control for the complete and unedited audio and video broadcasting and recording of the legislative proceedings of the House.” 

After hearings, the Rules Committee voted eight to seven to report a substitute resolution (H. Res. 866), sponsored by Sisk and Rep. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). The substitute directed the Speaker to defer a final decision pending a final Rules Committee report on alternative broadcast systems.  

Rep. Long and his subcommittee were entrusted with issuing that final report, which was released on Feb. 15, 1978, along with a resolution the majority leadership could support. It called for a House television system owned and operated solely by the House.   

The matter was finally resolved on June 14,1978, through dueling amendments to an appropriations bill. The amendments were authored by Anderson and Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Adam Benjamin (D-Ind.). Anderson’s amendment, to prohibit a House-funded television system lost 133 to 249. Benjamin’s amendment, barring any TV system operated by an outside entity, then succeeded, 235 to150. The table was set for beginning live, public television coverage early in the 96th Congress (1979-80).  

What about those two cable guys I had lunch with back in 1975? Brian Lamb went on in 1979 to found C-SPAN (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network); and, that same year, Robert L. Johnson founded BET (Black Entertainment Television). The first day of C-SPAN, March 19, 1979, was the day the House began televising its proceedings to the public — hence the cable company’s 45th birthday celebration last week. Rep. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) delivered the first one-minute floor speech on live TV, declaring the advent of House television as having, “the potential to revitalize representative democracy.” 

Perhaps ironically, in his memoir, “Man of the House,” O’Neill took credit not only for the compromise of only showing the member speaking (no reaction shots), but also for doing “exactly what we did in setting up the cable network known as C-Span (sic).” As I observed in my first book, “Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial” (2000), it “may come as news to Brian Lamb…that Tip O’Neill was the real founder of his network.”  

Lamb’s original idea, of course, was that the new network would carry the live proceedings using its own cameras. As it turns out, Lamb probably got the best of both worlds with the House footing the bill for running its own system and C-SPAN carrying the live feeds from the House. That is why I chuckle whenever I hear someone referring to, “the C-SPAN cameras.”    

Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran, culminating as chief-of-staff of the House Rules Committee in 1995. His latest book is, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays” (2018).