We all owe C-SPAN a big vote of gratitude for empowering citizenship in the television age.
On March 19, 1979, C-SPAN began its first broadcast of the United States House of Representatives. The first on-camera speaker was then Representative Al Gore of Tennessee. It was a tremendous breakthrough in allowing citizens to see the House live and without editing or bias. The man who thought it through and made it possible is Brian Lamb.
From the standpoint of the House of Representatives, I had been particularly impressed by David Halberstam’s"The Powers that Be," which had captured Speaker Sam Rayburn’s concerns that bringing media into the Congress would destroy the traditional power structure and give uncontrollable power to media savvy mavericks who could be powerful on the outside no matter what the old guard thought.
Members who would fly a thousand miles to talk to 250 people could not imagine that they could walk across the street to the House Chamber and address tens or hundreds of thousands of people at no cost.There was a group of Republican women in Waterloo, Iowa who would watch us on C-SPAN and then, after our special orders, call each other and discuss what we had said. One of them went to Puerto Rico and saw Jack Kemp who was vacationing. She ran up to him and said, breathlessly, “Oh Mr.
When a junior member is attacked by the Speaker of the House, it creates a news opportunity too big to ignore. Billy Pitts, the Republican floor strategist, turned to Trent Lott and said intensely, “move to take the Speaker’s words down.” Lott jumped up and did so. When the clerk read back O’Neill’s words, it was clear they violated the rules of the House. The Parliamentarian ruled that they did in fact constitute unacceptable speech, and O’Neill was ordered to be quiet for the next 24 hours.
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