aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
C-SPAN’s muscle means it’s time we build our own
Much as I like C-SPAN, I remember its roots.
I sold cable door to door in the early 1970s, or rather, cable sold itself. A region would come online and 6 out of 10 people would sign up, no questions asked. Cable franchising was in high gear and the public was ready for the broadcast monopoly to end. Commercial broadcasters, no dummies they, saw the cable industry as unwanted competition. 
They successfully used the threat that the rise of cable would mean an end to “free” TV to pressure Congress into supporting a block to further cable development through a freeze on new franchising activity.
The cable industry fought back. Among the arrows pulled from its quiver, along with the ever-popular “consumer choice” and “number of channels,” was the industry’s ability to produce programming and then show it on cable-only channels. In those days before broadcasters bought up and started multiplying cable networks (and before they were themselves, in turn, bought up) cable television had excess bandwidth. A cable-industry financed, non-profit public affairs programming network for televising sessions of the U.S. Congress was Brian Lamb’s stroke of genius.
C-SPAN launched in 1979 with an Al Gore speech. It receives no funding from any government source, has no contract with the government, and does not sell sponsorships or advertising. It strives for neutrality and a lack of bias in its public affairs programming. Still, I see it as born of - and in inherent service to - the cable industry’s congressional lobbying campaign. As cable and broadcasters fought on, cable would give in to city franchising authority pie-in-the-sky demands. Then once its monopoly was secured, successfully complain about how unreasonable those franchise provisions were.
But that’s another story. I’m telling the C-SPAN story today because of the recent Nancy Pelosi flap:
House Republicans recently complained in a press release that Nancy Pelosi was infringing on copyrights by posting video material from C-Span on The Gavel, the Speaker of the House’s web site. Turns out that all but one of the clips was actually public domain footage, and the release was retracted. But as a New York Times article points out, this raises further questions about C-Span’s role as a private company that purports to serve the public.
Ah, the tables have turned. C-SPAN has built up some muscle it now can flex:
“What I think a lot of people don’t understand - C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” [C-SPAN corporate vice president and general counsel Bruce] Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.”
Without use of C-Span’s material, members of Congress will have to rely on government cameras to get their message out.
Of course, it was government cameras that enabled C-SPAN to build up its muscle. If now those cameras have atrophied, it’s time to build them up again and bring them back. Cory at Boing Boing::
The U.S. Congress provides webcasts for many of their hearings. In all cases, the hearings are streaming only, in many cases they are “live only” (no archive of the stream). In some cases, the committees even put a “copyright, all rights reserved” notice on the hearings!
This is really dumb. So, I’ve started ripping all congressional streams starting with the house and posting them in a nonproprietary format for download, tagging, review, and annotation at Google Video and another copy at the Internet Archive (just to prove this is a nondenominational issue
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This is a Tom Sawyer hack, a la “painting this fence is *loads* of fun!” I intend to prove to the Congressional webmasters that it is so much fun doing their web sites for them that they’ll want to do it themselves so that I go away. Until then, look for “Carl Malamud on behalf of the U.S. Congress” for official news.
