C-SPAN's Window into the Political Process

For most of the contemporary era, election campaigning was dominated by a symbiotic relationship between candidates attempting to broadcast a message and highly controlled media outlets picking and choosing what they would consider as news.. Politics became a game of competing sound bite initiatives in which the candidates hoped to capture voters and television networks hope to titillate and draw in audiences. By 2004, the average candidate sound bite had shrunk to about 7 seconds, about the amount of time it takes to say, “Hello, my name is….” While sound bite politics is still part of the process, a number of new players have entered the arena and changed the calculus. The change was not cataclysmic, but rather gradual.

C-SPAN Founder, Brian Lamb, built on his experiences as a military public affairs offices, Senate staff member and journalist to come to the conclusion that being limited to the three television networks failed to capture the full flavor of politics in Washington. He felt that the public deserved and wanted more voice and more detail.

When C-SPAN (The Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) entered the scene in 1979, it bucked the trend toward sound bite coverage and committed itself to full coverage of congressional sessions and later public policy forums and candidate speech. As much as possible, viewers gained full access to events as if they were in the audience. Going a step beyond the formal even itself, cameras were turned on during the preparations and for the wind down after an event captured the non-scripted aspects of the endeavor. Later C-SPAN would begin following candidates around as they participated in traditionally uncovered campaign activities such as “meet and greet sessions,” coffee klatches, and pep talks to volunteers. By seeing the entire event, the C-SPAN audience gained the context with which to better understand issues and measure the mettle of candidates. Such coverage “caught” candidates such as Joe Biden in duplicitous statements undermining their campaigns, while others such as Bill Clinton used the new vehicle for broadcasting their capabilities. C-SPAN tapes have become the repository of political statements of politicians for the last 30 years, making duplicity more apparent.

As technology changed, C-SPAN invested heavily in web-based distribution of content, pioneering information on demand (www.c-span.org). Now interested citizens could easily find and view full events mentioned in brief form by the mainstream media. For the first time, viewers could see campaign commercials for candidates vying for various levels of office around the country. C-SPAN archived recent events for immediate viewing and supported a long-term archive of all its programming. Years before YouTube began archiving sound bites for viewing on demand, C-SPAN made the entire event accessible.

The extended 2008 primary season gave C-SPAN the opportunity to become the political “network of record.” Few people could keep up with all the events debates and speeches. While the major networks picked up events such as Mitt Romney’s defense of his Mormon faith and Barack Obama’s repudiation of the extreme comments of his minister, C-SPAN was there for less publicized events. Rather than giving snippets of victory and concession speeches, they covered them in their entirety. C-SPAN viewers saw Hillary Clinton give a speech on “How to Caucus” to Iowa Democrats, Barack Obama speaking before the Black audience of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, while John McCain is seen speaking at venues as diverse as the Anti-Defamation League and the National Rifle Association.

C-SPAN’s website is also a very useful portal for a wide range of audio, video and text resources on politics and elections. C-SPAN’s call-in programs provide an interesting measure of public sentiment on a day to day basis.

C-SPAN is not for everyone. The C-SPAN “junkies” have an atypically high interest in politics and public affairs. In the political world, C-SPAN viewers are enviable targets for political campaigns, since they vote, contribute money, talk to their friends and volunteer in campaigns. C-SPAN provides them a largely unedited window on the political process.

Steve Frantzich is Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Naval Academy. Two of his recent books are: Founding Father: How Brian Lamb Changed American Politics, and Citizen Democracy: Political Activism in a Cynical Age