C-SPAN is 34.

This line from Andrew Malcolm amuses:

…a recent personal visit to C-SPAN’s headquarters overlooking Capitol Hill found a far different scene. It’s a wild, ‘Animal House’-like place where rap music blares, paper airplanes fly about and Friday afternoon beer parties and hallway wrestling matches are legendary.

We encountered C-SPAN’s founder Brian Lamb in cutoff jeans, flip-flops and an “Impeach Everybody” t-shirt, a beer in each hand and a necktie around his forehead. Lamb was celebrating a rare occurrence, an actual budget in the United States Senate after nearly four years of flouting the law.

All that, of course, is hooey. As Lamb puts it in his trademark steady manner, “Other than quorum calls, every day at C-SPAN is a party.”

It is, in its way.  Nobody in this business is really sure why it is that C-SPAN works so well, and nobody in this business is brave enough to fiddle with it, either.  It’s like finding the one spot in a dead space where you can get four bars on your cell phone; you don’t want to move.  If you can, you just leave the phone there.

OK, the metaphor breaks down at this point.  Still, C-SPAN is great and it’s got tons of people on both sides of the aisle who very much want to keep it that way.  So hopefully we’ll get another thirty four years of paper airplanes…

Moe Lane

PS: Their video library really is bloody amazing.