BRIAN LAMB: The Election’s Real Winner

The Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network--best known as C-SPAN--will be recognized by its cable peers Sunday during “The 14th Annual CableACE Awards” ceremony, which will be telecast live on Lifetime Television.

C-SPAN was established in 1979 with funding from the cable TV industry to provide gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House of Representatives. C-SPAN II was added in 1986 to cover the Senate. The network, available in 56 million homes, has a devoted following.

The network will receive the Golden CableACE Award, the industry’s special recognition for a project or program that “distinguishes cable communications by its unique contribution,” for its comprehensive coverage of the 1992 presidential elections. C-SPAN offered its viewers uninterrupted coverage of both parties’ nominating conventions, live viewer call-ins and 24-hour Election Day coverage.

Brian Lamb, the network’s founder, chief executive officer and on-air host, talked about C-SPAN and its role in the 1992 presidential election with Times Staff Writer Susan King by phone from his office in Washington, D.C.

Was the cable industry skeptical when C-SPAN began in 1979?

I think the majority of people who heard of this idea in the early days did not think it would work. The interesting thing was there were a couple of people in the cable industry who made the difference and said yes. The most cynical people were here in Washington. The people who lived and worked and operated in Washington thought it was a really stupid idea. They couldn’t imagine anybody outside of Washington, D.C., being interested.

Doesn’t your audience span every walk of life?

Yes. It is a very wide cross-section of people who watch it.

Did you find with the 1992 election that more young voters were tuning into C-SPAN?

We first saw it in 1988. We were often thought to be a network for the over-50s, and our demographic study that came back after the ’88 election is that we had a larger audience in the under-24s than we did in the over-65s. It happened again this time around.

How did C-SPAN change its coverage of the 1992 presidential election from previous elections?

I think you start with the fact that almost anything that happened in the campaign we carried. I think Bill Clinton was on this network for 450 hours of speeches, call-in shows, open phones and the national debates.

Probably where you got an insight into these people, more than any other time, was when we clipped a transmitter mike on them and followed them through the crowds. It is an old thing we have been doing a long time.

We now have 60% of the American people who can watch (C-SPAN). Back in 1988, it was in the low 40s and back in 1984, in the 30s. Our basic approach has not really changed so much, but we have got a lot more people who can watch it. This was, since 1968, the most interest the American populace had in an election.

Wasn’t it also the first election in recent memory in which the candidates took an interest in call-in shows and town meeting formats?

I don’t want to pop the bubble on the call-in show thing, but Jimmy Carter did a call-in show from the Oval Office. Richard Nixon did a call-in show during the ’68 election and (so did) Hubert Humphrey.

The difference this year was that the commercial TV networks started doing things they had never done before: Take telephone calls from the public. God forbid the public have direct access to our television networks. That’s what really changed.

If you look at the overall coverage, you will find that the commercial networks, especially with the morning shows, never gave more coverage in history than they did during this campaign.

The real story is the political infrastructure of the country. The people who are involved in making the early decisions in (the election) process have been watching C-SPAN for 10 years and have been watching Bill Clinton and Al Gore for 10 years. We have covered them in-depth in all these regional meetings.

When Bill Clinton hit New Hampshire, they knew him. They knew who Ross Perot was long before he made his appearance on the Larry King show. We started covering him back in the mid-80s. We got tremendous reaction from him.

In the very early days of television, the pioneers did an awful lot of what we do now. What happened was they found early on that this didn’t make money, so they shelved a lot of it. What cable has been able to do is make it work in a much less expensive operating environment. Our budget for 1992 was $18 million. Our first 10 years of existence our budget ($36 million) was equal to what Dan Rather made during the 10 years.

Even after 13 years in existence, does the public still have misconceptions about C-SPAN?

We took a poll and found out 3% thought the cable industry owned it, 2% thought the government owned it and 95% of the people have no idea who owns it. It’s a lot better than having them think the government owns it. There’s not a dime of taxpayer money in this place. We think it is very important for the audience to know that.

“The 14th Annual CableACE Awards” air Sunday at 5 p.m. on Lifetime.