I want my C-SPAN.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 May 2003
• Author: Sanford, Bruce W.
• Published date: 01 May 2003
• Author: Sanford, Bruce W.

A few years ago, Brian Lamb, the founder and public face of C-SPAN, was asked during an interview about Newton Minow's famous indictment of American television. If anyone in the communications industry today has the credentials to brush aside the question, it is Lamb, who reinvented public affairs programming over the last two decades. C-SPAN now reaches approximately eighty million U.S. households--one in twenty Americans watches it regularly. (1) The producers of The Bachelor would envy its demographics. C-SPAN is "reality TV" that even Minow would have loved.

But despite his successes, Lamb did not scoff at the question. "I think [Minow] was right about an enormous amount of television," Lamb replied in the 1999 interview. "[B]ut I think you could say that about an enormous amount of things American. One person's wasteland is another person's great pleasure." (2)

The journalist who kicks off the political day with Washington Journal and has provided a forum for hundreds of authors on Booknotes, expanded on his answer:

One of the hardest things for us to understand is that...