Politics as visual

Theresa Rusho, a 30-year-old Brighton resident, recently won a C-Span essay contest that asked entrants to describe how the cable outlet motivated them to activism. A former organizer for the Howard Dean campaign, she likes C-Span's uninterrupted coverage of "the rallies, the debates, the speeches," particularly when compared to the typical "five-second sound bite." But she is also wary of a wonky stereotype.

"I don't want to fall in the `C-Span junkie' category," Rusho cautions.

This month, C-Span celebrates a quarter-century as America's ultimate reality show. With a staff of 270, a budget of $40 million (funded by the cable industry), three C-Span networks, 10 websites, two C-Span buses, and a reach into 88 million homes, the nonprofit operation is a success story. But its basic programming menu -- unfiltered coverage of the House and Senate, debates, hearings, speeches, interviews, press conferences, seminars, panels, and campaign events -- remains an acquired taste. And its devotees are often pigeonholed as the kind of geeky get-a-lifers who were once officers in their high school audio-visual club.

Brian Lamb, the founder, CEO, and guiding spirit of C-Span, says the network "matters a great deal to a certain slice of the American public. I call them the 10 percenters, I call them the junkies." "This is not television," says Lamb, if you define TV as "a place to make money and entertain people."

If it's not television, then what exactly is C-Span? A poll conducted in January by the Pew Research Center offers a pretty good clue to its unique national niche. The survey found that a whopping 64 percent of the people who have never watched C-Span said it was "very" or "somewhat" useful for the country. Asked to describe C-Span's unusually lofty image among those who ignore it, Pew research director Michael Dimock says "people are happy it exists."

Steve Frantzich, the author of "The C-Span Revolution," echoes that sentiment. "Most people don't use it much, but they like the idea it's there if they need it," he says. "I kind of view C-Span like I view the public library."

The man who built this public library -- and whose plain-spoken and unflappable demeanor embodies C-Span's no-frills approach -- is the 62-year-old Lamb, an Indiana native who fell in love with broadcasting as a teenager and who once hosted a local version of "American Bandstand" called "Dance Date." A graduate of Purdue, Lamb is a Navy veteran who spent time in the Pentagon public affairs office during the Vietnam War, freelanced for UPI radio, published a newsletter called The Media Report, and worked at the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy during the Nixon administration. Then the idea for C-Span started percolating in his fertile mind.

"I started forming opinions of what I was getting in television," he recalls. "I kept saying, `You know, there's more to this than what we're seeing.' "

Amos Hostetter Jr., a founder of Continental Cablevision, was among a number of cable executives who ponied up an initial $25,000 to get the project going. He says Lamb "is one of the remarkable social entrepreneurs of the 20th century. He went around hat in hand . . . with the concept of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House of Representatives. I really didn't get it, but I had enough respect for Brian to back his ideas."

On March 19, 1979, with a staff of four and access to 3.5 million American homes, C-Span began live coverage of the House of Representatives. A year later, it debuted the first viewer call-in show, and by 1984 it was airing uninterrupted coverage of the nominating conventions.

It launched the popular "Booknotes" program in 1989, carried 128 hours of Clarence Thomas's contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, and in the 2002 election cycle aired more than 100 House, Senate, and gubernatorial debates. By its accounting, C-Span has covered more than 24,000 hours of action on the House floor.

When asked about the appeal of his Washington-based network, Lamb says, "You can sit at home in Missoula, Montana, and frankly, if you have time, know more than the people in the [government] business in this town."

Cameron Lawrence happens to be a 38-year-old Missoula resident who teaches quantitative analysis at the University of Montana. He is such a C-Span aficionado that he opted for the satellite dish when his cable provider would not carry C-Span II. He fell in love with the network 13 years ago, when he "stumbled upon `Booknotes.' " "C-Span kind a gave you a glimpse of the [writers'] lives," he says.

Regina LaBelle is a former Washington, D.C., resident who used to work for the Democratic National Committee. Now a Seattle resident and the legal counsel to that city's mayor, she helped found "Citizens for C-Span" in 1997 when the network was temporarily taken off the air by the local cable operator. "When I moved to Seattle, it was really hard to get access to those national issues, so I started watching C-Span," LaBelle says. "The thing I love now is watching the unedited speeches of the presidential candidates."

Serious news consumers like Lawrence and LaBelle certainly fit the profile of the C-Span viewer. According to the Pew survey, 83 percent of regular C-Span watchers say they are registered to vote, compared with 73 percent of Americans overall. And while only 49 percent of the public said they were following the news from Iraq very closely, 73 percent of the C-Span audience was paying close attention. The C-Span viewership also skews more Democratic than Republican, and a quarter of its audience is over 65, making it a little grayer than the population at large.

The Pew survey found that 12 percent of the respondents said they tuned in regularly with another 31 percent doing so occasionally; but in that poll, C-Span was the only media outlet mentioned. In a 2002 survey that allowed respondents to choose from a number of news sources, only 5 percent said they regularly watched C-Span, with another 18 percent checking in occasionally. The network claims 34.5 million weekly viewers.

Lamb describes C-Span's mission as "a social good," a "public service." But when asked whether, after a quarter century, C-Span has been good for America, he displays some admirable Midwestern candor. "I have trouble answering," Lamb admits. "I don't want to sound self-serving. I don't know."

Though Americans might think that the combination of a better-informed populace and lawmakers who know they're being watched would produce better governance, the consensus is that the nation's politics have grown angrier and more partisan in recent years.

"I think public discourse is coarsened, it certainly has become more conflictual," says Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of "The Vanishing Voter." "We're in an era of attack politics."

Has C-Span "solved all our problems? Certainly not," says Frantzich, a professor of political science at the US Naval Academy. But "I don't think you can blame C-Span for the current level of rancor and the current level of partisanship."

If there is a C-Span poster boy -- someone who epitomizes the value of this experiment in giving citizens a window on their government -- it may well be Jon Thyng, a 27-year-old student at Wichita State University who is in the Air Force Reserves. A self-described "outrageous kid who finally took life seriously," Thyng tuned in one day and saw a group of North Korean refugees recounting their painful experiences.

"It was very emotional, it hit me real hard," says Thyng, who is part Korean. He plunged into political activism, working in a mayoral campaign and serving on the steering committee for Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback's re-election campaign. A big fan of the "Washington Journal" call-in show and "Booknotes," he credits C-Span with opening up a new world for him.

"I never got into politics until last year," Thyng says, "and it's changing my life completely."