C-SPAN House gavel-to-gavel coverage hits 35
Not everyone is a fan of TV cameras during debates or hearings
WASHINGTON C-SPAN marked 35 years of live coverage of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, and like everything else in Washington, its effect on Congress is a matter for debate.
“It’s probably the worst thing that happened to the Congress,” Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, declared in an interview with USA TODAY.
Young concedes his view is the minority opinion in a city of devoted C-SPAN watchers, but he argues that television coverage of floor debates and committee hearings have contributed to the coarsening of debate and the polarization between the parties. He is one of eight remaining House members who served in the chamber before the first C-SPAN broadcast began airing gavel-togavel House coverage on March 19, 1979.
Stephen Hess, who studies media and government at the Brookings Institution, said he doesn’t see a correlation between enhanced transparency and decreased congressional popularity.
“Suddenly, the Congress is in ill repute, and I don’t know if it’s ever been quite this bad, but there were many years in the past 35 years where it wasn’t in ill repute, and it still had C-SPAN going. So it’s not C-SPAN that created the ill repute,” Hess said.
Pressure from the media and the public for greater access to the legislative branch expanded the network’s reach to the Senate floor in 1986 on C-SPAN2 and into committee proceedings. Today, all but two committees, Ethics and Intelligence, provide
“There’s such a huge benefit from the tremendous transparency that C-SPAN has brought to all levels of congressional decision-making.”
televised access to their proceedings. The push for transparency continues with efforts to get cameras in the Supreme Court.
“There’s such a huge benefit from the tremendous transparency that C-SPAN has brought to all levels of congressional decisionmaking,” said Bill Adair, a journalism and new media professor at Duke University, who uses the network’s archives as a resource in his classroom.
Former vice president Al Gore tweeted a link Wednesday to a video of his 1979 floor speech, the first aired by the network, when he was a congressman from Tennessee. “Television will change this institution, Mr. Speaker, just as it has changed the executive branch, but the good will far outweigh the bad,” Gore said then.
Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, prides himself for talking on the House floor, which C-SPAN calculates
Bill Adair, a journalism and new media professor at Duke University
he has done more than any other member in four of the years since he was elected in 2004. He is in constant competition with fellow Texan Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat.
Poe has a trademark signoff — “And that’s just the way it is” — for his floor speeches in which he discusses everything from Texas history to foreign policy. “My basic philosophy: Government should be open to the public, and they should know what we’re doing,” Poe told USA TODAY.
Whatever the impact, people are certainly watching. C-SPAN is a non-profit network and isn’t tracked by Nielsen ratings, but a 2013 commissioned survey showed that an estimated 47 million adults tune in at least once a week.
“I’m surprised so many people are watching C-SPAN when I’m talking,” Poe said.