- Before 1979, the only way to see the proceedings of Congress was to visit the Capitol.

Today's guest believed the American public had a right to see government working, and convinced the cable industry to make it happen.

He's C-SPAN founder, Brian Lamb, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller.

- This week, we're joined by a legendary media executive, the founder and former CEO of the cable satellite public affairs network.

You might know by its acronym, C-SPAN.

Brian Lamb, thank you so much for joining us today.

- Thanks for inviting me, Jim.

Good to see both you and Wayne.

- Well, you know.

So I, when you and I were talking a little bit before we got started here, but I have been watching C-SPAN for 30 something years started as a teenager in the eighties.

And sometimes I've wondered whether you were celebrating the way democracy works, or if you were shaming the people who were making democracy not work.

And I wonder if you could speak to that sort of that tension because you've laid bare a lot of what's right with American democracy, but also what's wrong.

- I actually, when I first started working on this project, I wasn't really sure what would happen, 'cause it had never happened in history where you would have a constant camera on a government like this.

At first I thought this was going to make things better and that we would better understand how it all worked.

But the primary goal really wasn't the Congress or government.

It was to open up this whole vast world that we saw tiny little bits on television at night for 30 minutes.

And that seemed to me to be wrong, that we needed to see a lot more of what went on, other than the evening newscast.

That was the drive more than anything to, and we got there.

It wasn't, we didn't do it, but we got there in the sense that now, we have all these programs, all these networks so that we can see more of the world.

And that was probably the primary goal.

- Did you anticipate, so there's, there are critics who say that, putting cameras in the chambers of the house and Senate has changed the way those institutions operate.

Do you put any stock in that?

- You can't put a camera in front of anybody without changing something.

So I suspect that there has been change that mattered, I had to tell you, and I've been doing this for 45 years.

I don't really think about it, because I think this country has to figure out how to be open.

And it's a struggle.

It's still a struggle today because there's just a story I read this morning about the Supreme Court.

The court doesn't want to open up the cameras and it wouldn't hurt anybody, but they think it would.

And so the decision is down the road somewhere.

- I just wonder if I could just sort of dive in a little deeper there.

What do you think is responsible for, we celebrate transparency for lack of a better term.

We talk about open democracy.

Why do you think institutions and individuals are so reluctant to have that daylight shine in?

- Well, Jim, you've been in government and around politicians and you know exactly what happens.

The minute you decide to run for office, or if you get elected, you want to control your image.

It's not a lot more complicated than that.

And once you think about the control factor, because I was a press secretary years ago to a Senator, it just changes everything.

They don't want you to see things that they don't want you to see.

I don't think it's a lot more complicated than that.

- Why do you think the Supreme Court is still reluctant to have cameras?

I mean, if you look at courts locally, across states and in different districts in the United States, many of them allow, I would guess maybe even most allow cameras to some extent.

Why is the Supreme Court holding onto, what it's such an old-fashioned modus operandi as it were.

- I could give you a long answer.

I won't bore you with that because it is complicated, Wayne.

They see what they think happened to the house, and the Senate and the presidency.

And over time, they've just kind of drawn the circle around the campfire and said, we aren't going to let anybody else in.

Even in spite of that, because of COVID, this chief justice went to zoom, WebEx or whatever, to have meetings, which was really a big change.

But more importantly for us, he let us have it all live.

And up until this point, we never had it.

- You've been around Washington, obviously through C-SPAN for a very long time.

What's your assessment of the state of politics today in the United States?

And again, that could be a very long answer, but give us whatever kind of answer you want to give.

- I'll keep it short.

It's not what people living today think it is.

They think this is the worst time in history and it's ugly and horrible.

All you have to do is go back to Lincoln.

You go back to Thomas Jefferson, you go back to George Washington.

They lived through some incredibly difficult and mean times.

And you know, back in the John Adams days and you know this Wayne, you're in that business, they put journalists in prison.

So this is not as bad as people today think it is, but there's a camera everywhere.

And that's changed the dynamics of what people are seeing.

So it's not good right now, but it's not necessarily the worst time in history.

Just think of the civil war.

- Is there something, you and I again we were talking before we got started here, and the spectacle in American politics today, we can always find those examples in American history, but between social media, 24/7 saturation coverage, and then on the cable news channels, are we overdosing on our exposure to politics?

- Some people are, but that number is not as big as the, some people who are overdosing think it is.

I don't know about you, but I got an enormous number of friends that don't watch any of this.

They don't care.

They have a life, but the people that overdose on it think this is just terrible.

And so that's, and if you're in the journalism business, I consider myself a journalist, and I'm sure Wayne probably feels the same way.

You think people ought to look at it more, pay more attention, dig down below the surface, but it is what it is.

And that's, I doubt if it's gonna change.

- What about disinformation?

It's not simply that some people are tuned in and other people are not tuned in, and some people dig deeper and some don't, some go to TV and some go to websites.

And there's the whole social media thing.

We've talked about this often on the show, but would love your take.

Given your long experience with media.

- I start with being, I'm not on social media and I don't like it myself, personally.

I don't need it, but I start with believing strongly in the first amendment being absolute.

I met with a bunch of 15, 16 year olds yesterday who are in Washington at George Mason university, participating in a seminar week on journalism.

And so I spent the whole hour asking them the same question you're asking me.

And they really don't care what I think, or you think, they love social media.

It's not going to go away.

And they think they can trudge through it and make sense of it.

But I will never go there because I think it's entirely too flip, but nobody really cares what I think about this.

- Well, we care, but, but let me ask you this.

One of the things that you've advocated for over the years, and I think in particular during the impeachment trials was the up the ability to put cameras on the floor.

So folks who watch C-SPAN know now that you're sort of limited to robotically operated cameras around the upper levels of the chamber.

What do you hope that Americans would see and learn if they had the kind of access that you've been advocating for?

- I don't think they would learn that much.

It's just the idea that again, we go back, Jim, to what we're talking about in the beginning about politicians wanting to control their image.

Let me tell you a brief story.

Years and years ago, I can still see the faces of the people I ended up having to deal with over this.

We proposed in a letter that we be allowed to put our own cameras in the house of representatives.

So a Democrat and a Republican formed a little committee, and they asked us to meet with them and talk about what we would do.

They among themselves, came back to us with a proposal, and you'll see how ridiculous it is that they put a rope at the back of the chamber.

And that we agree not to show what the members are doing inside that rope, negotiating things for the next vote that they're going to have.

And it really shows you how little they understand what we're trying to do.

And it doesn't matter that they don't understand it.

They don't care.

They want to control their image.

And I don't think if we had 14 cameras in the house of representatives that would really get you any more information than you have now, it would just show you that on most occasions, the place isn't filled and they're debating among the committee members and eventually they have a vote, but it's just the whole idea.

That's our house over there.

It doesn't belong to them.

And that never gets through.

- You know, go ahead, Wayne.

- [Wayne] Yeah, there seems to be a common misconception that C-SPAN is funded by the government, and that isn't in fact, the case.

Can you talk about the funding?

How C-SPAN operates its revenue stream and how it pays its people and its first technology?

- Because of our funding for the last 42 years, that we've been a network and broadcasting, we're in a slippery time, because we get paid per customer that the cable operator has or the satellite operator has.

And that number has gone from about 94,000, I'm sorry, 94 million over the last six, seven years, down to below 70 million.

So we have lost, and we only get six pennies a month per customer, just take 72 cents times that 25 million.

That's how much money we're losing.

And that's how we get paid.

We don't have, although we've started putting advertising on our website, and we will continue to increase that, this is a tough time for us, but we've never taken a dime of any kind of tax payer money.

And didn't want to, that was part of something that I felt very strongly about from the beginning.

- So cable subscriptions are dropping obviously, I mean you just described and that trend is, is expected to continue.

What do you see in the future in terms of a funding mechanism?

You mentioned advertising, which of course would be a revenue stream.

Any other ideas that are in the works or might be in the works?

- We'll probably try everything.

You're in a public television world.

And, you know, that's been successful with a combination of taxpayer money and auctions and all the other ways and contributions.

The problem we have is that the numbers are going down, they're not going up.

Everybody, by the way, has this problem.

I don't care whether you're in public television or CBS, the numbers are going down because of the competition, they're going down because of cable television losing subscribers.

And everybody's looking over their shoulder.

I don't know where it's going to go.

The good news or the bad news is I'm old enough that it probably won't be decided in my lifetime, but it's the young folks are going to make a big difference in deciding what they think is important.

- Brian, what got you interested in public service and in politics?

- The Navy, as you and I were talking Jim, I spent four months at OCS, Officer's Candidate School there in Rhode Island, and in Newport.

I grew up in a small town in Indiana, Lafayette, Indiana.

I went to Purdue university, which is in the town.

I hadn't traveled widely.

I hadn't done much outside of that area.

I loved my early years, but once I got in my little Chevrolet and drove to Newport Rhode Island, that changed everything.

And once I got on a ship and traveled overseas, that changed everything.

And I eventually got back to Washington, after two years on the ship and spent two years at the Pentagon, and that changed everything.

So it's just a matter of growing older and having more experiences.

- [Wayne] You have the C-SPAN video archives, which is a real treasure.

It's free, it's accessible to all.

It's got an incredibly deep library of recordings.

Talk about the importance of that, but maybe start with how you decided to create that.

Because again, you don't just have to watch live broadcast.

You can go back decades and find a real important and interesting material, including from the book world.

I've been on C-SPAN books a number of times, but go ahead and talk about that archive.

- The archive is probably the most important thing we've done, over the years, because it will contain history forever.

And now that everything is digitized, it's going to be there.

It's not going to go away.

Every, a lot of what we've done is total serendipity.

And I use that word only because I just finished teaching a class at Purdue via zoom, for four weeks in which we had all kinds of guests, like you all have every week.

And almost every guest telling these young people how they, frankly, the course was how to get a job in Washington.

And Jim, you did it.

So, you know, it's not easy, but you can do it, but almost every guest.

And we had 35 guests over the four weeks said serendipity.

And that's the way the archive started.

I went back to Purdue university back in the mid eighties and asked to meet with a bunch of professors and didn't know what I was doing.

And I said to the little luncheon group we had, I think it would be fun to start an archive at Purdue that would serve what we do.

And one guy at the table, there were six professors there, guy named Robert Browning.

He's still there said, I think I can get that done.

And so we started out as a combination of our money and their facility and he built the thing, still runs it.

He's, Robert wouldn't like for me to say this, he's in his seventies now, he's sensitive about age, but Robert has done a brilliant job of creating, with a very small staff, this archive that it's free to everybody, and our cable television industry allowed us to do that as a part of what we do.

And it's there, and anybody that wants to use it can get online, call for whatever they want to see.

It's probably 270,000 hours right now.

Since we started this, as you both know, there's something called YouTube, and YouTube has billions of minutes of video.

The only thing that they don't have though, is everything cataloged and abstracted and all that.

And that's the beauty of the archive.

It's a small place, but a huge effort.

That's how this all got together.

- Remarkable resource, we've drawn on it ourselves.

- This is going to be a bit of a digression, but you used the word serendipity to describe how this archive happened.

And I want you to talk about the role of serendipity in a lot of creative and other processes, because it's so important.

And I don't think people talk about it a lot.

This show, to some extent is the result of serendipity.

I think Jim would, - To a big extent, yeah.

- To a big extent, talk about that.

It's something that we don't really discuss, and people think everything is planned and it follows a path and a formula, not true in many ways, in life, really.

But anyway, talk about serendipity.

I loved that you used that word.

- You know, I don't like the sound of that word, for some reason, I never have, but it defines my life.

I mean, everything I have done has been serendipitous.

I, if you meet somebody and you say, I'm interested in this and the next thing you know, they said, well, come see me.

I gave you an example.

When I was in the Pentagon every week on Thursday, around 11 or 12, o'clock, Robert McNamara, who was basically the architect of the Vietnam war, would have a news conference in his dining room with print press and television people.

But it was not, it was on the record only to be quoted as a US official.

And the next day you would pick up the New York times or the Washington post, or one of the newspapers, or your newspaper.

And up in the top right-hand lead story, would be US officials say we're going to bomb north Vietnam.

And I was in the Pentagon, and I was in the defense public affair's office.

And I used to say, that's weird.

The average person has no idea where that's coming from.

There was no indication that it was Robert McNamara.

And I would listen on the, closer deal.

And one day I went to across the hallway and I said to a guy who was a government employee, who was very open.

And I'd say, his name was Bob Harvey.

I said, Bob, I'd love to go sit in that room.

And he said, well, okay, son, you know, maybe someday, and I'd see him in a couple and I say, Bob, don't forget my request.

I wanna go sit in that room.

One day, he came into me, tapped me on the shoulder.

He said, come with me.

And I went up in that room and sat there and you know what it's like?

You've been there, you've been inside.

And I said, you know, the public just ought to see this.

This is heavy duty stuff that journalists know.

I knew cause I was in the office, but the public had no idea.

And that was serendipitous that I could go see that.

And that is a story of my life.

One thing led to another led to another and that's how C-SPAN got here.

And it took a lot of people.

I mean, I have to tell you cable television executives who you'll never, you never heard the name of them are the kind of American citizens that said, yeah, count me in on that deal.

And they didn't get anything out of it.

They really didn't.

Some people thought they were going to get something out of it, but they didn't.

- We've got about six and a half minutes left here.

I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk to you a little bit about the events of January 6th.

You're a longtime observer of Washington.

protests are not new to that city, but there was something different about January 6th.

And I wonder if, just from your perspective, what do you make about the events of that day?

- We are located a block from where all that stuff happened.

And one of the things that I did early before C-SPAN was I would, when I was in the military, I'd put on my jeans on a Saturday and go down for the Vietnam protests on the mall because I, again wanted to see it myself.

This time I wasn't in there, but we had people in there with cameras, and after it was over, I sat down with them and talked to them about it.

They were level headed about it.

They weren't in the direct fire of anything.

It does not matter what I think of that day.

And of course it was a terrible day.

The town thinks it was a terrible day, and the town is divided right now.

And it depends on what side you're on as to who is terrible.

But it wasn't until a couple of days ago.

And my wife and I walk every morning on the mall at 6:00 AM, somewhere in the mall that we watch.

And I photograph one fence after another being put up and then one fence after another being taken down.

Well just a couple of days ago, they finally took the fence down around the Capitol.

Cause they're scared to death over there for a lot of reasons that folks will come back and go back in that Capitol and do more damage.

It was a terrible day.

We don't know the full extent of it.

People are still in jail because of it.

Some people haven't been sentenced and all that, and haven't even been tried, but you guys know this is, this will go down in history as a very important, significant bad day in this town.

- So I have to ask you this question.

I'm going to call you a master interviewer because you are, what advice do you have for people like us who do interviews or for people in general, journalists?

What are the good interviewing skills that people need to know regardless of what profession they're in, because most of us, many of us interview in one way or another, even if only for a job?

- Well, this probably isn't fair to the two of you, but you both have been doing a C-SPAN style interview.

(laughing) - That's a great compliment.

We'll take it.

- [Wayne] We will take it.

- We have, I have, and always have had a very simple approach to this.

As a matter of fact, as I'm sitting here answering your questions, I keep thinking, what would I want a guest to do?

If they were being asked the questions you're asking me, and that that's as important as what the interviewer does.

I don't believe in the kind of journalism that's developed in television, where they interviewer has to tell the interviewee what they think first.

I hate it.

I can't watch it anymore.

I turn it off.

And by the way, I don't care whether you hate Fox, love Fox, hate CNN, love CNN.

They all do it now, because they're paid lots of money to be the center of the program.

And if you do what you do, Jim or Wayne or what I do, that's not the issue here.

The best interviews, in my opinion, are when you ask a question and listen, and then when somebody says something, you follow it up.

And it's so simple that I'm afraid to even waste your time telling you, because you both know what a good interview is.

- I read something that you spent 20 hours of prep time for one hour interview, is that accurate?

- It is.

But there was a goal in mind for me as a very inadequate student at Purdue university that I wanted to start reading books from start to finish.

And so I set up a goal of reading a book before I interviewed somebody.

You don't have to do that.

I did it and loved it.

And I read 800 books.

When I went through the booknotes, started a program that went on for 15 years.

And I changed the name of it for, I wanted to stop having to read a book, it was killing me.

(laughing) Q and A. I still read books but I don't read them from cover to cover necessarily.

And that's the only reason that I spent that kind of time.

I love preparing.

I don't know about you guys.

I love the research part of it.

Most writers and journalists do.

- Well we talk all the time about sort of the privilege it is to do this, to spend time even virtually with someone like you.

And one of the things that has sort of emerged to us is that a lot of people who are really successful, whether they're in the world of creative, like from Hollywood or they're from the world of politics, the people that are really, really successful, by and large are nice people.

Like there's a quality about that.

That is kind of enlivening, I find.

- I don't think there's any question about it.

The worst thing that happens to people in the public spotlight is they talk too much, and they don't know how to listen.

And they are so used to everybody asking them what they think.

I can go days without somebody saying to me, how's your day, what have you been doing lately?

What are you reading?

It's amazing to me, especially in this town, this is the worst town I've ever been in for that.

But people in general, and this is not my original phrase are on transmit rather than on receipt.

And it's just so great to listen to people tell you their story.

It's the best thing that I do every day.

If I don't.

And I told these kids yesterday, I remember trying to get through to them, stop talking and start listening, and you're going to go a long way in journalism.

- [Wayne] That is incredibly good advice.

So good.

- Hey Brian, we've got about 15 seconds left here.

You are officially retired from C-SPAN, but you're not really, what are you doing these days?

- Hanging around.

(laughing) - And coming on our show, thank you!

- They let me go.

You know, what I am doing, and it is fun is I have a podcast and through C-SPAN, and it's called Booknotes plus, and the other thing, and I'll be very quick.

I've done two conversations with two historians, Richard Norton Smith, and Doug Brinkley.

One of them is eight hours long and one of them is six hours long.

Now, where else can you do something like that but at C-SPAN?

And that's fun for me at this stage in my life.

- [Jim] Well, it's fun for you, but it's great for us too.

Brian Lamb.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can always find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org.

We can always catch you up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next.

More Story in the Public Square.

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