Ten Years Ago... Cable Dropping C-SPAN

Lamb to the Slaughter
[SOURCE: New York Times 2/5/1997, AUTHOR: Frank Rich]
[Commentary] Nothing, nothing, gets C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb ticked off. Well, almost nothing. Ten years ago, Lamb was a bit upset that cable operators would throw off his network if they can sell the channel slots to a higher bidder. "Rupert Murdoch has dumped more money into Fox News in the last four or five months than C-SPAN spent in the last 18 years," he said. "He's buying his way on to cable systems." Lamb added that he was speaking in frustration, not anger, but his words conveyed real heat as he attributed C-SPAN's travails to the supposedly "fabulous Telecommunications Act'' Congress passed in 1996. What made C-SPAN's vulnerability a particularly alarming indicator of the perils of our ruthless new media culture was that it, of all quality programming, has theoretically powerful protectors. C-Span is, after all, the prime unfiltered video showcase for Congress. It is also a network created and financed by the cable industry itself, as a gesture of good citizenship and public relations. But that gesture may have been a fig leaf. As Gene Kimmelman of Consumers Union said, ''Now that stock prices are falling, cable companies will do anything to boost earnings.''
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