How C-SPAN started

I had the pleasure of interviewing at Patrick Henry College my favorite interviewer, C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb. Here’s some additional material on the origins of C-SPAN and Lamb’s diligence in preparing for interviews.

By the 1970s you had learned a lot about Washington. Did you want to show the country what you had seen, and is that the genesis of the idea for C-SPAN? Close. It seemed to me, as a Midwesterner from a small town, that there was a lot we weren’t seeing on the evening news. ABC, NBC, and CBS basically had the same lead stories, and often a couple days apart they had the same feature stories. It seemed to me there should be a way for us to see more.

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 and C-SPAN started in 1979. Any connection between those events? I thought the Vietnam War was covered in a somewhat unbalanced way. I don’t mean to imply for a minute that I thought it was the right thing to do, but they were very much for the war in the beginning, and then—almost the same way it happened in Iraq—they turned on it. CBS concentrated only on J.W. Fulbright, the senator from Arkansas who was the head of the Foreign Relations Committee. That’s all we ever saw, and his hearings were conducted in a way that was very much anti-Vietnam at the time. We didn’t get any kind of a balance.

Because you wanted balance, you’re sometimes described as a conservative, but I understand that’s a label you don’t want. If you had to describe yourself in one word, how would you do that? Totally independent. I’ve never been a member of a party. I have great sympathy for people in the news business. They think they’re being objective, fair, and balanced, but they all have feelings, they all have ideas. I’m always surprised when people in the journalism world will register in one party or the other.

Well, if a reporter is on a side, why not register Democratic or Republican? Isn’t that the honest thing to do? I wish they’d tell us when they’re reporting which side they’re on. I like the way it is now. When I tune in to Fox News or MSNBC, I know which side they’re on. I’d rather people almost tell me what they think, if they think strongly about something.

What was the Fairness Doctrine? Human beings in the Federal Communications Commission were responsible to make stations practice “fairness.” You got very little controversy on a lot of stations because they were afraid to step over the line.

Did the Fairness Doctrine bring about fairness? It did not. The Fairness Doctrine, in my opinion, was ridiculous, awful, made no sense. The best thing about not having a Fairness Doctrine is that you’ve got talk radio with left-wingers and right-wingers, and they can say whatever they want to.

When in journalism do personal beliefs come into play? You have your own life experience, which means certain things are more important to you than others.

Students can Google “Brian Lamb” or “C-SPAN” and see a lot of fascinating interviews and comments. One you did with George W. Bush 10 years ago had its moments. You asked, “The longer you’re in this White House, with all those that have gone on before you, do you see ghosts of past presidents?” Bush replied, “I quit drinking in 1986.” Are there other memorable rejoinders or particular interviews that come to mind? One of the reasons I came here today is the interview I did with you 20 years ago. I had asked Newt Gingrich, “What is a book you’re reading now that you would like to promote?” He brought up a man named Marvin Olasky. When I got back to Washington, I went to bookstores trying to find The Tragedy of American Compassion and none of them had it. I got on the phone, called around, and found it at a Christian bookstore out by Dulles airport. On a Saturday afternoon I drove by myself out there in the rain and bought four copies.

That probably exhausted the whole first printing. Then I called you and said, “Would you do the Book Notes interview?” You did. I love that story, because people always ask, how do you get these books? You get them in the strangest places at the strangest times.