This summer, longtime CNN Washington bureau chief Sam Feist is set to become C-SPAN’s new CEO. He’s taking over a venerable and respected Washington institution, which is saying something these days. But the network is closely intertwined with another Washington institution that’s in far worse shape: the U.S. Congress. This leadership change might be a good time for C-SPAN to reflect on its own significant, if unintended, role in the deterioration of the nation’s lawmaking, and consider whether a greater awareness of the costs of transparency might show it ways to mitigate Congress’s dysfunctionality.
Delivered via cable and satellite, the Public Affairs Network has been a fixture on Capitol Hill for nearly half a century, broadcasting House proceedings since 1979 and Senate proceedings since 1986. Since the mid-1990s, it has carried most committee hearings (on TV or online). All of its congressional coverage — along with numerous programs on public policy, history and civics — has been offered in a selectly nonpartisan manner from the start, and has always been seasoned with earnest sobriety. If you like the more idiosyncratic side of politics, you’re surely a C-SPAN junkie. It’s hard not to love the network.
And yet C-SPAN has also contributed to the deformation of the work of Congress – and our political culture. This is not because of the way the network goes about its work, but because of the nature of its primary purpose: broadcasting House and committee proceedings.
Transparency has been C-SPAN’s watchword since its inception. Its goal was to bring the people’s house to the people, to let Americans see and hear what their representatives are doing. Yes, transparency is an essential democratic good. But all good things are a matter of measure, and there is such a thing as excessive transparency in political institutions.
Cameras have transformed all of Congress’s deliberation rooms into performative spaces, leaving members with less and less space and time to speak and work in private. The most obvious consequence of this transformation is the explosion of sensationalism in both chambers. There has always been sensationalism in Congress, of course, but the ubiquity of cameras has taken this vice to new lows. To make matters worse, the ubiquity of cameras has attracted cadres of members who see public appearances as the essence of their jobs.
But more importantly, what is not Nothing happens in Congress because of the presence of cameras. The institution’s core job is to negotiate legislation, and negotiations can’t really take place in public. Politicians can’t afford to be seen making concessions or trading off between key priorities in real time. They can be held publicly accountable for what they ultimately produce or how they vote on a compromise bill, but making the process public would stifle it.
That reality hasn’t changed in the C-SPAN era. Safe spaces are still required for actual legislative negotiations. But now, at midnight when a government shutdown is imminent, leaders’ offices are often the only such spaces left. So it’s hardly surprising that much of the important legislation is being crafted there.
While that’s better than nothing, leadership talks are no substitute for committee negotiations. The work of Congress clearly suffers from a lack of negotiated agreements, and because Congress is the only forum in our system for such horse-trading at the national level, our entire political culture is more polarized as a result.
Of course, the televised broadcast of Congress is not entirely to blame for this phenomenon. The increasing partisan bitterness in our political culture has many interrelated causes. But in Congress in particular, the transformation of deliberation rooms into performance stages has done serious damage. C-SPAN was born to pursue an idealistic civic goal, but it has contributed to a demoralizing societal breakdown.
The solution is not to burn down C-SPAN. The network does a lot of good by informing viewers about public affairs and American history. And anyway, there’s no turning back from televising (and YouTube-ing) much of Congress’s work. But by considering the problems it has contributed to, C-SPAN could advance some solutions.
One sensible move may seem counterintuitive: To make Congress a little less performative, C-SPAN should push to loosen the reins on its coverage of the House and Senate chambers. Most congressional proceedings never took place in the House and Senate, where voting and, on rare occasions, debate take place. But with the advent of televised chambers, they have also become prime venues for sensationalism, because congressional rules require C-SPAN to show only close-ups of the speaker. That way, the audience doesn’t see that the speaker is often speaking to an empty chamber and the dramatic video clip is just for show. This turns C-SPAN into reality TV rather than enabling the reality of Congress to be televised. Wide-angle shots of the chamber could reduce the production of such clips.
We know that might help, because Congress actually allowed C-SPAN to do that for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To curb Newt Gingrich’s and other televised improvisations, Democratic leaders in the House allowed C-SPAN to pan during speeches. The House ended the practice in 1994 at Gingrich’s behest. C-SPAN has asked for permission to resume it several times since then, to no avail, so there’s no telling whether another push would succeed. But it’s worth a try, especially as part of a broader effort to rethink video coverage of Congress.
This broader effort should focus in particular on creating space for some committees to work behind closed doors. Formal hearings will certainly continue to be televised, and many politicians could not afford to do away with that. But committees in both houses could openly treat hearings as public events and officially use them for that purpose, while also formally organizing a new form of core legislative work: private working sessions in which proposals are floated and legislative agreements negotiated. Such business sessions, or whatever the committees choose to call them, would not replace hearings but complement them. Ideally, they would provide members with a much-needed forum for real deliberation. If the experience of the intelligence committees is any guide, many members would welcome this private format.
And C-SPAN itself should not resist such changes; it should encourage and embrace them. In fact, the network could even fix some of Congress’s dysfunctions by making the problems of 21st-century Congress the focus of its programming over the next few years. Rather than ignoring the inevitable impact that televising legislative work must have on that work, C-SPAN should embrace the fact that its medium and format can shape the culture of Congress — and seek to change it for the better.
For example, the network could regularly host formal, structured conversations between members of key committees from both parties, giving them a public platform to talk together about their committee’s work and their own priorities. In such a setting, the presence of television cameras would actually prevent sensationalism. It would also help members get used to speaking respectfully to each other across party lines — and C-SPAN junkies would be more accustomed to seeing it. Public discussions on C-SPAN’s terms could amplify private discussions away from the cameras.
C-SPAN could also launch a series of programs that address the challenges and ills of Congress and provide information about possible reforms. This could include hearing from experts on the history of Congress, hearing ideas for redesigning its rules and practices, leveraging the work of the House Select Committee on Modernizing Congress, and giving both members and outsiders a chance to talk about how the institution could work differently. The audience for such a program would obviously be small, but reforming Congress requires only the support of its own members, and it’s safe to assume that C-SPAN can have some influence on their internal culture.
While these are not magic bullets, they are all modest ways for C-SPAN to acknowledge the costs of excessive transparency in Congress, to embrace its identity and audience, and to recognize that Congress today is in some ways dysfunctional and therefore incapable of bipartisan negotiations and agreements.
Such negotiations across all borders are, after all, the purpose of the national legislature and a fundamental purpose of the Constitution. The framers of our system knew that working on negotiated agreements required a certain degree of privacy. The Constitution itself reflects that fact, having been drafted by a Congress behind closed doors. “Had the deliberations been public,” Alexander Hamilton argued in 1792, “the clamour of faction would have prevented any satisfactory result.” Any observer of Congress at that time can see that he was right that a Congress capable of advancing the cause of greater national unity needs a certain degree of seclusion from the glare of cameras.
