▶ Why I Founded C-SPAN: Brian Lamb Tells All (Including His Crush on Brenda Lee) - YouTube
Mar 19, 2014
On March 19, 1979, C-SPAN first aired proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives. American politics and media would never be the same.Over the next 35 years, C-SPAN would expand its offerings to include coverage of the Senate, a wide variety of interview programs and live events, Book TV, radio broadcasts, and much more.
At the center of the C-SPAN story is Brian Lamb, who not only conceived the network but redefined the long-form television interview with a style that has been called stoic, spartan, laconic—and unbelievably effective in producing fascinating, revealing conversations.
Born in Indiana in 1941, Lamb told Reason that his interest in offering unmediated coverage of official legislative proceedings stemmed in part from his job in the Pentagon's public affairs office during the Vietnam War. "I kept saying to myself," Lamb recalled, "there's something wrong there. This ought to be an open situation, and the more closed it is and the more insular it is, the more both sides can fool the public for their own reasons. And we found ourselves in a major war, 500,000 troops deployed and 58,000 people killed."
Despite the immeasurable public value it provides, C-SPAN has never taken a dime of taxpayer money, always proudly insisting that it was "created by cable" and is funded by pay-television operations at no cost to taxpayers or cable subscribers.
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