Schrödinger's Lamb

Though I'd known about C-SPAN for many years, I had never really thought of the channel having a founder until I met Brian Lamb while I was helping to get a Borders in Virginia ready to open. At the time, Lamb was a member of Borders' board of directors, and as the many years he hosted Booknotes on the channel indicate he was very much a book lover. In contrast to many of his fellow Cable TV pioneers in the late 1970s, Lamb stands out for his embrace of the value of cable TV to the public than for any personal financial value gained in the process.

In that light, the news that Lamb is stepping down as C-SPAN's chief executive seems all the more the end of an era in today's highly consolidated profits-above-all media environment. There's a case to be made that the advent of C-SPAN and the opportunities for self-promotional speeches it's given legislators has contributed to the poisoning of political speech, but that's very unfair to Lamb whose motives by all indications were entirely noble.

As anyone who's ever seen a reality show knows, people tend to act differently when they know the camera is on them, and in theory our legislators should know better than to overindulge themselves. That they frequently don't is hardly Lamb's fault. Moreover, it ignores the very fundamental premise on which C-SPAN is founded.As he himself put it, “Those meetings are paid for by we, the taxpayers. People should be able to see what [the elected officials] look like, what the buildings look like, what language they’re using.” Whatever impact observation might have on our experiments in democracy, Lamb is absolutely right about that.