WASHINGTON, 12 April 2005 — Brian Lamb does not have international name recognition, but he should. He is the creator of C-Span, a nonprofit, public affairs cable network that encompasses three cable television networks, a radio station and 10 websites dedicated to uninterrupted and unbiased coverage of national events and government proceedings. One out of 10 Americans over the age of 18 watch C-Span on a regular basis.
When first launched in 1979, C-Span it did not own a camera when it was beamed into 3.5 million households around the nation. Twenty-five years later, the cable company provides coverage to millions of people around the globe on the day’s most important government events and news proceedings.
A serious, no-frills 24-hour news network, C-Span is known for having no political bias and brings the political and cultural debate to the TV viewer unedited. Its revenue comes from cable companies and other distributors.
Lamb was recently honored with the Al Neuharth Free Spirit of the Year Award, which was created in 1999 to honor the founder of the Freedom Forum and USA Today. The annual award goes to a person in the news who has demonstrated the capacity to “dare, dream and do,” the motto of the award.
Lamb, 63, whose face is unrecognizable to most people, has changed the face of television. His public-affairs cable network has gathered of devoted following of people who glean — through C-Span — the inner workings of Washington D.C., from congressional proceedings to Pentagon press briefings.
Lamb’s passion for accuracy in the media began in an unusual manner. He started out as a young naval officer assigned as a public affairs officer at the Pentagon, which led to his passion for open government.
“The government lied to us during Vietnam,” he recently told reporters. “We just weren’t getting the straight scoop.”
His characteristic bluntness does not diminish when discussing today’s politicians: “The thing that gets under my skin more than anything else is that politicians have learned to never answer a question. They’re learned to hide. They’ve figured out that if they wait long enough, they can come back in a month or two, and no media person will ask them about the earlier controversy.”
If he’s tough on politicians, he’s tougher on the media: “You have an anchor person making $10 million a year, being chauffeur-driven and riding around in private planes,” he told reporters. Such pampering makes it impossible for them to know about the challenging reality the middle-class Americans deal with on a daily basis, he says.
As CEO of C-Span, Lamb earns $250,000 a year. Despite his comparably modest salary as a CEO, he has opted to donate the entire $100,000 stipend that comes from the Free Spirit of the Year Award into a foundation that will give money to help educated-related programs.
Lamb, who studied the economics of television in his days as an analyst in the White House Office of Telecommunications in the early 1970s, later moved into the cable TV business as a reporter for trade journals. In interviewing some key congressmen, he found that he could secure permission to televise Congress in action: Uninterrupted, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the democratic process was just the sort of low-cost news programming which the cable industry was looking for.
