During the late 1970s, Brian Lamb, then the Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief of an industry trade publication called “Cablevision,” proposed a channel on the growing cable spectrum to provide gavel-to-gavel coverage and airing of the U.S. Congress in action.
Though a handful of Congressional hearings had been televised as early as the Army-McCarthy Senate Hearings of 1954, the day-to-day business of law-making and the many ‘non-business’ functions of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate were largely shielded from public view.
Lamb came up with the concept, and with the help of an early cable TV pioneer Bob Rosencrans, and an initial investment of $25,000.00, in 1979, C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network,” was on the air.
Then, and now, a private nonprofit organization, C-SPAN receives no government funding. The network has a staff of around 250, offering 24-hour coverage and programming across three different programmed networks. C-SPAN’s focus is the U.S. House of Representatives. C-SPAN 2 covers the U.S. Senate, shifting weekend programming to American History on Saturdays and Book TV on Sundays. C-SPAN 3 covers congressional hearings, conferences and public events, campaigns, and press briefings, by the White House, as well as members of Congress.
C-SPAN is nonpartisan and attempts to be apolitical while providing more detail and nuance of how the Congressional legislative process works than any other news outlet on the planet. C-SPAN receives voluntary funding from the cable TV industry, in the form of payments for viewing household and per channel at a rate of roughly 10 cents per viewer, per channel, per month. These three networks are available on roughly 7,900 cable systems in 86 million U.S. households. Both of those latter two numbers are shrinking, as TV viewers cut their cables and move to…
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