Not everyone is a fan of C-SPAN cameras in Congress

WASHINGTON — C-SPAN marked 35 years of live coverage of the U.S. House on Wednesday, and like everything else in Washington, its effect on Congress is a matter for debate.

"It's probably the worst thing that happened to the Congress," declared Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, in an interview with USA TODAY.

Young concedes his view is the minority opinion in a city of devoted C-SPAN watchers, but he argues that television coverage of floor debates and committee hearings has contributed to the coarsening of debate and the polarization between the parties. He is one of eight remaining House members who served in the chamber before the first C-SPAN broadcast began airing gavel-to-gavel House coverage on March 19, 1979.

Stephen Hess, who studies media and government at the Brookings Institution, said he did not see a correlation between enhanced transparency and decreased congressional popularity.

"Suddenly, the Congress is in ill repute, and I don't know if it's ever been quite this bad, but there were many years in the past 35 years where it wasn't in ill repute, and it still had C-SPAN going. So it's not C-SPAN that created the ill repute," Hess said.

Pressure from the media and the public for greater access to the legislative branch expanded the network's reach to the U.S. Senate floor in 1986 on C-SPAN2 and into committee proceedings. Today, all but two committees, Ethics and Intelligence, provide televised access to their proceedings. The push for transparency continues with efforts to get cameras in the Supreme Court.

"There's such a huge benefit from the tremendous transparency that C-SPAN has brought to all levels of congressional decision making," said Bill Adair, a journalism and new media professor at Duke University, who uses the network's archives as a resource in his classroom.

Former vice president Al Gore tweeted a video Wednesday to his floor speech in 1979, the first aired by the network, when he was a congressman from Tennessee. "Television will change this institution, Mr. Speaker, just as it has changed the executive branch, but the good will far outweigh the bad," Gore said then.

The network's archives dating back to 1987 are free and searchable online providing a public resource to some of the more memorable moments in recent political history. "In many ways, C-SPAN is kind of like the public library. We don't use it on a regular basis, but we like the fact that it's there," said Steve Frantzich, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

For the anniversary, C-SPAN promoted 35 key political or policy moments that played out on the House floor, such as Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, resigning on the House floor, the government shutdown in 1996, the impeachment debate for President Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi becoming the first female speaker.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, prides himself for talking on the House floor, which C-SPAN calculates he has done more than any other member in four of the years since he was elected in 2004. He is in constant competition with fellow Texan Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat.

Poe has a trademark sign off — "And that's just the way it is" — for his floor speeches in which he discusses everything from Texas history to foreign policy. He says he often writes his remarks in the middle of the night when he can't sleep.

"My basic philosophy: Government should be open to the public, and they should know what we're doing," Poe told USA TODAY. A former judge, Poe said he was one of the first in Texas to allow cameras in his courtroom.

He not only supports cameras in the Supreme Court, but in federal courts as well. "There is such a conception of the judiciary, and it is not real positive," he said, "because (people) don't know what goes on behind those doors, and if the public has a right to sit there and watch it in the courtroom, they ought to have the right to see it on TV."

Whatever the impact, people are certainly watching. C-SPAN is a non-profit network and isn't tracked by Nielsen ratings, but a 2013 commissioned survey showed that an estimated 47 million adults tune in at least once a week. The network is paid for by cable and satellite television distributors and reaches 100 million households.

"I'm surprised so many people are watching C-SPAN when I'm talking," Poe said.