WHAT'S ABOVE THE SUBTEXT? (via Mike Daley):

The Virtues of C-SPAN (Harvey Mansfield, September/October 1997, The American Enterprise)

With a healthy, unexciting breakfast, you need a zesty appetizer to start the day. I receive mine from C-SPAN, where the morning talk show, "Washington Journal," gets my partisan juices flowing. A liberal and a conservative politician pick articles from the morning paper and usually get into an argument. They spin, they bicker, they exchange barbs. I love it.

C-SPAN, two [now three and a radio station] educational channels funded by the cable television industry, is known for providing "unfiltered" news-including live coverage of floor debates in the U.S. House and Senate, unabridged taping of campaign stump speeches, and similar political jousting. Yet the same network famous for providing the most partisan news is also considered the most objective. Why? Because C-SPAN lets politics appear as it is, with all its partisan slants. Sometimes the slant is obvious, as when a Democrat or Republican states his party's position, and sometimes it is concealed behind the desire to appear "nonpolitical" (or "bipartisan"). C-SPAN tolerates both: It doesn't dismiss people's opinions merely because they are partisan, and it doesn't dismiss the aspiration to rise above partisanship merely because the effort often fails or is insincere.

Brian Lamb, the head moderator, and his able assistants do something almost never done on the major networks. They listen and they question; or rather, they listen so that they can question. Lamb's purpose is to enable the talker to make his point, not to embarrass him. But to do that, he asks for evidence, for a source, for an example, for consistency, or-when it's a wanderer-for the point. Sometimes the result is to embarrass an ill-informed caller or a biased guest, but that is not the intent. The intent-though Lamb doesn't boast of it-is to educate.

On C-SPAN talk-show programs the moderators do not simply sit by silently while others talk; they maintain an active neutrality that helps all sides. They want to improve our respect for democratic debate; so they do their best to make the debate worthy of respect. You never hear a voice-over or a sound-bite on C-SPAN. In a voice-over, the network reporter gives the gist
of a speaker's statement in his own words, and then often illustrates his interpretation with a punchy phrase actually taken from the speaker. The emphasis is the reporter's, and the speaker, who may well be the President of the United States, becomes a character in the reporter's story-and thus a witness to the reporter's moral or intellectual superiority.

The ruling vice of American journalists is not that too many are Democrats but that they show such disrespect for democracy. Their error is mostly unconscious but nonetheless grave: They despise the surface of things and look too much, too quickly, for the inside story. The surface of things in democratic politics is the partisan dispute of the moment, but journalists allow themselves to get bored with that. They don't listen partly because they have heard it before and mostly because they are convinced beforehand that it doesn't mean anything. The only important events, they believe, are the ones that go on behind the scenes, and the only important words are those spoken in private: what we don't see determines what we do see, and the job of the journalist is to unearth secrets, not to report what is obvious.

C-SPAN, by contrast, is not afraid of the obvious.

If you're headed to the videostore today and your spouse is as much a policy wonk as you, see if they have Alexandra Pelosi's documentary, Journeys with George. It's an entertaining look at the boys on the bus, covering George W. Bush in 2000. The portrayal of Mr. Bush is rather generous, including the key scene in the film, where he comes to Ms Pelosi's rescue after she's pulled a boner. Moreover, there's a very sly plotline in which the most cynical and partisan reporter in the film ends up playing a key role in another controversy, and in retrospect we can see that Ms Pelosi has essentially been working to destroy his credibility.

But the film does have a significant weakness, one pointed up by Mr. Mansfield above: even as the media complains constantly that the campaign is devoid of substance, Ms Pelosi avoids the substance almost entirely. We see that George Bush is at Bob Jones University or at a debate or giving his nomination acceptance speech, but get none of the words. His candidacy becomes almost inexplicable except to the extent that he charms the journalists covering him. It's almost as if the election were about whether they ended up liking him or not. That they do is a credit to one fact of his political skills, but it does make the election seem as if it was devoid of ideas--a notion which his presidency has laid to rest.

MORE:
THE WALLFLOWER KNOWS: C-SPAN has downsized Washington, revealing it to be a city of mere people, not giants. (William Powers, March 24, 2004, The Atlantic)

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 27, 2004 9:23 AM