The Dispatch Podcast - The Future of Television Journalism | Interview: Sam Feist

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Steve Hayes is joined by C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist to discuss the state of news media and how C-SPAN’s new show might offer a way forward. The Agenda:—News consumption in 2025—Being a “clinician”—C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire”—Challenging the consumer—Camera’s in Washington—C-SPAN’s funding—How C-SPAN is different The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Or a lot of fear. Mom. Or you can get completely terrified. Who's that? Choose wisely. With Halloween on Disney Plus. Is the political news consumer better off today than he or she was 30 years ago. We'll discuss that and a lot more with my guest on the Dispatch podcast today,

Sam Feist, who is the CEO of C-SPAN. Sam, welcome. Thanks, Steve. Glad to be here. That question, is the political news consumer better off today than he or she was when you and I arrived in Washington roughly the same time 30 years ago? The consumer certainly has a lot more choices. There's a lot more variety. 30 years ago, there was no internet.

So the political news consumer not only had fewer sources, but far less access to those sources. I think I would sum it up as yes, because I believe in choices. And every consumer doesn't necessarily want to get their news and information exactly the same way from, say, the New York Times and a network newscast. And so now they have options. They can still go to the New York Times. They could still go to a network newscast. but there's so much more. So much more.

And in your view, it sounds like you think more in this case is better. I think more choices for a political news consumer is better. There's societal implications about all of those choices, particularly when you add in social media. But as a political news consumer, I like to have choices. And I have far more choices than I did when you and I started this 30 years ago. What if more of those choices are? are bad choices, outlets, purveyors of information that give us crummy information or things that aren't really true. So as a news consumer myself, I'm going to choose which outlets,

I think, give me useful, good, practical information. Once again, from a societal perspective, I think getting flooded with less accurate, less credible information is bad for society. But unless I want to go and explore what somebody on one side of the spectrum or the other is reading that may not be credible, but I just want to look into it. I don't pay attention to those sources. I find trusted sources and stick with them. You are smart. You've been doing this for a long time. You live in it.

You swim in it. You, I would say, have a preternatural ability to determine what's good and what's not good, what's true, and what's not true. One of the things that we hear a lot from dispatch members, from other people I meet who follow politics. One of the things that Jonah and I used to get in our Q&A is when we gave speeches before we started the dispatch. One of the reasons that we decided to start the dispatch was normal average Americans. who are outliving their lives, driving kids to sports, working two jobs, but are interested have a much harder time today determining where to go for something reliable and true. And that's why I ask the question I ask you.

Because, well, I'll tell a little story, tell a story about myself. And I hate to resurface this, actually. I gave a speech at Washington College in Maryland. I want to say it was around 2005. The date is checkable because you know who broadcast that speech. C-SPAN maybe? C-SPAN. Hey.

And I was asked to talk about what the proliferation of information sources would mean in terms of the information ecosystem and the ability of people to get better news. Early Internet days. Very early Internet days. I mean, early for me, because I was a little late, and the weakly standard, we were very late. But, yeah, I was asked to talk about what this would mean for political journalism. And I gave a very, I made an argument.

My argument was, after years of the media being dominated by the left, this was the moment for conservatives and libertarians to build their own institutions, to do their own reporting, to provide their own information. And what we were in front of was, to steal a phrase, the golden age, the coming golden age of information. I look back on that and I think I could not possibly have been more wrong. We have instead been flooded with shit and it's so hard for people to figure out what's true and what's not. That's why I ask you the question I ask you, what do you say to somebody who's listening to this in the car or on a walk and says,

it is true that I have so many different places to go, but I have such a hard time figuring out who to trust and who not to trust. I, first of all, I'll acknowledge I have a luxury. I work for a media company. I have subscriptions to the major news outlets. I have cable TV that I pay for in my house. You know some of these journalists personally and you know whether they're credible. But I, if someone is going to have a normal or limited news diet as most,

Americans do by necessity of time, they have other lives, they have their kids, kids sports, their jobs, they have all of their other activities. They aren't doing what you and I do for a living. But if you have the luxury of having access to only a couple of sources, I always suggest that if you read the news pages of the Wall Street Journal and then pick the New York Times or maybe the Washington Post and look at the editorial pages of each, you're a pretty well-informed American. There are certainly other information sources you can go to, but if you simply do those two things,

you've got a relatively balanced diet of news and opinion that lives in the world of facts that is trustworthy, and when they make a mistake, all of the journalists at the organizations I just mentioned are effectively required to correct those mistakes. So that's not a bad start. The Wall Street Journal is generally viewed as at least slightly more conservative on the news pages and certainly on the editorial page than the other two, but you see the point.

Start with those two, and you're a relatively well-informed American with not a bad variety of perspectives, both from the news and editorial pages. I want to get back to a discussion about what we're seeing today in. the media and how people consume their information. But first, I want to go a little Brian Lamb on you and ask you a little bit about you. You are roughly my age, which is to say pretty old, mid-50s, we'll say, and you've been in this world for a long time. Where did you grow up, and how did you first become interested in politics? I grew up in West Tennessee. Both my parents are from the same little rural town in West Tennessee.

I grew up near Memphis. And my parents were not politically active in politics. They voted. They were consumers. But boy, did we watch the news every single night. From what age? Well, from before I could watch television, they were watching the news. But as I, you know, even as a three or four-year-old, I'm quite sure that I was in the

living room and watching Walter Cronkite with my parents in front of the zenith console television that we had in our living room. And I actually remember it from, I mean, I remember when Nixon resigned myself, because I could picture it. I think I was five. And so that was just part of our family habit. Simpler days, talk about fewer choices. And, uh, um, um, um, But I just always enjoyed watching the news with my parents. And then as I came into adulthood, I was just a news junkie. I was interested in politics. I love politics.

I don't fancy myself as left or right, Democrat or Republican. But I think I found a way to play in politics without having a particular ideological perspective. And that's as a political journalist. You get a front row seat. And I never felt tugged in one direction or another. So that's why I didn't go to the public. Not at all. So you look at politics more like a clinician.

Yeah. Rather than somebody who's drawn because you believe in lower taxes or a bigger social safety net. Correct. And then as I have made it my career, I actually view it as part of my job to be a clinician. And that's fine for me. And so my job, especially at C-SPAN, is I really view our role as political journalists, my role as political journalists, give the public, the voting public, the tools they need to make that most important decision as a citizen, who to vote for.

And it's not my job to tell them who's right or who's wrong, who to vote for. My job is to give them all the tools they need and let them make the decision. And so I've realized I've actually lived that, even though it sounds a little pomp. Alianish. Was there a moment where you said, I know I want to get in, I know I want to get into political journalism when you knew that this, what you wanted to do? I think I have known since high school that I wanted to be a journalist, or I felt that, or I felt that that would be something I would really be interested in, maybe be good at, and just kept on doing it in college and after college. So there we are. Were there any journalists you looked up to in those early

years or in your sort of early professional years where you said, I want to do journalism like that person or I love that lifestyle that I'm seeing. It was a little bit less about the lifestyle and just I just enjoyed the practice. Sometimes it's about access. You know, if you're covering sports, you're in the press box or you're on the field. And that's a bit of a metaphor for journalists who cover politics or the governor or the president. It's, You, in some ways, you actually do have that front row seat. You might have access to the information before anybody else. You get to process it to your question about who.

I don't know that I had a particular, I don't know that I was following many journalists growing up, other than, as I mentioned, Walter Cronkite, was just part of ever-present in our living room. As I get older, I had a particular affinity for Edward R. Murrow, as to many television journalists, simply because in many ways, he invented what we think of now as modern television network journalism in a lot of ways. You are now the CEO of C-SPAN, and there's a lot to discuss, a lot of interesting, new things taking place at C-SPAN. let's start with the launch of a new show called Ceasefire, which we're recording this Saturday early evening in Phoenix. Sam and I are at a newsgeist journalism conference in Phoenix. This will drop on Monday. And the show launched last Friday night. Friday night. What is the idea behind

ceasefire? Who can came up with it? And how did the first episode go? So before I came to C-SPAN, I spent most of my career at CNN, decades, at CNN, 30 years. And off and on throughout my career, I worked on a program called Crossfire, sort of a legendary cable news program where you had a host from the right and a host from the left and a raucous debate. And it was fun. It was entertaining. Sometimes it became knock down, drag-out fights. Didn't really find common ground, wasn't intended to. Didn't really find compromise. But it was interesting and maybe important at the time. One of the hosts of Crossfire, legendary magazine writer and editor, Michael Kensley, when he retired from Crossfire,

we had lunch. And Michael said, I love Crossfire. Great program. Has a purpose. But one day, Sam, you should produce a program called ceasefire, his word, his name, where you actually seek to try to find common ground if you can find it, maybe compromise. And I perhaps politely nodded and say, okay, yeah, maybe we'll do that one day with no real sense that we would be doing that one day. Well, let me, sorry, let me interrupt you just quickly. Why didn't that resonate with you at the time he said it? That's a good question. Perhaps a fair critique of where cable news has been and where it is now you know crossfire was a successful program it had conflict it had excitement it was high energy and um there was a sense and maybe it was a fair sense that that's

what worked in cable news and i worked in cable news so at any rate i never really thought about it seriously um however that conversation that voice has been inside my head for 20 years now and so now, about a year ago, I left CNN and went to C-SPAN. And suddenly, not just because I'm at C-SPAN, but also where are we in our politics? There is very little civil conversation going on, at least publicly between Republicans and Democrats. Our Thanksgiving tables feel like they have descended into chaos if anyone starts to talk about politics. We've kind of forgotten, I believe, as a society, how to talk with people that we disagree with if politics enters the conversation, whether it's a family member or a neighbor or someone you work with or

if you're two members of Congress. So it occurred to me that maybe Michael Kensley's idea wasn't such a bad idea. And I thought, well, what would a program like this look like in 2025 at C-SPAN? And so a lot of members of Congress come on to C-SPAN. And as they would come on or I would go and visit members of Congress up on Capitol Hill or I'd run into them, I'd always asked them, I say, who's your best friend on the other party? And they always had an answer. In fact, some of them said, my best friend in Congress is from the other party. And I said, if I did a program called ceasefire, would you go on with them? They said, 100%. I said, even if your political advisor said it's not a good idea? No, no, I would definitely do it. So after talking to triple digit numbers of

members of Congress about this concept, I thought, you know what? There are enough people who will do it. And so we decided to actually do the program, and the first episode, of course, was this past weekend. And so now we have a program called Seesfar. And the first episode, I mean, pretty big names on this first episode. It was Rahm Emanuel and former Vice President Mike Pence. I've not, it's seen the episode, you were there for it. How to go? It was great.

It was so sort of taking that notion of members of Congress who are, our friends, maybe not well-known, Mike Pence, Congressman from Indiana, and Rahm Emanuel, who was a congressman from Illinois, their offices were next door to each other. And it was not well-known, but they both acknowledged they were friends. Um, Mike Pence, and they talk about it on the, on the show, and you can find it on c-span.org or on YouTube. Um, the, uh, Raam Manuel will come over to Mike Pence's office because Mike Pence had a, uh, popcorn machine. And popcorn is a big deal in Indiana, I guess. And he'd come over and just get popcorn.

And sometimes he would actually see Mike Pence and they'd talk. And then they would talk more. And then they would walk down the hallways together. And they actually realized they're both from the Midwest. Mike Pence's family was from Chicago. And they became friendly and actually became friends, even if they were from different ideological perspectives. And that's what this show is supposed to actually show,

is that you can have a conversation with someone you disagree with. It can be civil. You can both be patriotic Americans. You probably do agree on more than you disagree. And you can talk about that. And that's what we don't see on cable news. We actually don't see almost anywhere. And we're not practicing in our society.

And so that's what the idea was. So yes, Mike Pence and Rahm Emanuel came on. And it was a terrific conversation. They didn't compromise their political views. But, I mean, Rahm Emanuel gave President Trump credit. for the ceasefire in Gaza, and I thought that was, I thought it was appropriate, and he thought he handled it really well. And Mike Pence agreed with Rahm Emanuel and some health care issues and some political issues. And mostly they talked about how they're friendly and they asked about,

they each have, they each have children in the military today. They share a lot of commonalities. And I think that's healthy, if nothing else were modeling good behavior for the country. I mean, you mentioned this sort of in passing a moment ago that maybe one of the reasons that you didn't sort of pay heed to what Michael Kinsley had said to you at the time was it was perhaps somewhat less necessary than it might feel today. Is that fair? I think that's true. I think there are, I feel like in the 2000s and maybe even a little later, there were more civil conversations on television, whether they were on the Sunday talk shows or where I worked at CNN. then maybe I'm remembering it with a rose with sort of rose color memory, but that doesn't happening now that you see these panels on TV and they're all shouting at each other and you see very few segments with Republicans and Democrats on together and certainly very few where they actually extend an olive branch for any reason.

And so this show is intended to do that to an extent. And I think if you ask people who work on Capitol Hill or political professionals, you'll find they respect each other more than you would know, and they talk to each other up on Capitol Hill much more frequently than we ever see on television. And so we're going to try to bring it into the public eye a little bit. Is this penance for your role at Crossfire? Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, in the end, after, you know, 40 years of cable news and and the advent of Fox News, which was very much, you know, I think from the beginning it was clear that they were going to be a right-leaning news outlet. I'm not sure that cable news has done a lot

to bring the country together. And so, yeah, maybe so. Halloween is right around the corner, and while most people are thinking about candy or costumes, a lot of people get into the season by reading and streaming great thrillers and mysteries. The problem is between paywalls and different streaming platforms it can get expensive and sometimes what you want isn't even available where you live that's where express VPN comes in express VPN lets you change your location online and unlock Netflix libraries from around the world it's cheaper than adding another streaming service and it helps protect you from real life monsters like hackers and data thieves with strong encryption if i needed this product it's what i would use and right now you can

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. you know i worked in cable news for a long time for some of that time for you you know i think about it a lot i don't have firm conclusions about it but i do think it's you know i pause and think about whether i contributed to the environment that we're living in now by just by virtue of the work that i did every day at fox you know i had the the privilege of being on special report which was fox's sort of main news show. It was a more serious place than a lot of the

primetime shows. Our conversations were more serious. I don't think we were we didn't really give in to the temptation to do the kind of outrage bait that so many other places on cable news and other places in particular at, I would say, at Fox News, did. So

in that sense, you know, I don't stay up at night thinking I contributed to it, but I think anybody who, you know, played a significant role, and you certainly played a significant role at CNN for a long time. You were at the top of the Washington Bureau, you sort of have to look back and think like,

yeah, okay, did I, did I help do so? I mean, Crossfire, just to take one of the many shows that you were involved in, I mean, there was a time when the ads for Crossfire had, you know, these guys dressed up in boxing uniforms and like the boxing glove motif and it was like, boom, boom. I will say, I was a regular viewer of Crossfire. I found it immensely entertaining, even if somewhat frustrating.

Do you worry that a show like Ceasefire, by its very design, will be less entertaining? Because you're bringing people to, you know, disagree or talk to one another in a civil way. Well, it may be less lower energy, if you will, but, you know, one of the things about television is that the network or the person producing a program that is unique actually might be successful. And right now, in October of 2025, there is nothing on television that hosts people from opposite ideological corners, Democrats, Republicans, if you will, and brings them on and have a civil conversation. So right now, it's a bit of a unicorn. And so in that respect, people may be a little tired of all the shouting. People may be tired of the cable news panels where there's bickering and really no progress towards solutions.

And so in that respect, I think it may be more interesting because it's unique. And perhaps you don't have to shout to get people to watch. Yeah, well, and I think there are other market signals maybe outside of television that suggests that there might be an audience for this, the growth of the growth of groups, outside groups, like Braver Angels, that exists to bring people together and have these set of cross-ideological, cross-partisan conversations. I would point to the success of the dispatch. I mean, you know, we have told people, if you're coming to the dispatch, because you think you're going to agree with everything that we're saying or writing, you're in the

wrong place. We want there to be civil disagreement. We want to have an exchange of ideas in that kind of an environment. We found that there's an audience for it. But it's thoughtful. it's sophisticated and groups like Braver Angels are proliferating all over the country in different ways because I think people are are hungry for changes to our politics. I don't think anybody's happy with the state of our politics. So is ceasefire on C-SPAN going to solve all of that? Of course not. Can it lead to some progress? Can it find a Republican and Democrat that have a conversation, maybe extend a friendship or maybe help them come up with an idea of where they can work together, that would be great. Let me ask a little bit about the effect of C-SPAN on our

political dialogue today and what happens in particular on Capitol Hill. I will just confess at the outset, I am a C-SPAN junkie. I've long been a C-SPAN junkie. I find myself when I'm bored, sometimes just clicking over to C-SPAN and watching, you know, random old booknotes, interviews, book festivals from Mississippi, Florida Bates, you know. It probably makes you just a little bit smarter every time. I mean, I'm not sure. At least I am better informed in some ways. But there's a, and I think there are legions of people like me, as you've no doubt come to find out, run into place. There is another argument that goes something like this. We have seen in

Congress on Capitol Hill, in particular, the rise of performative politics. I think it's the dominant form of politics today, people performing for the cameras. They didn't do that as much before, you know, C-SPAN in part, cable news in part, but before that they knew everywhere they were on Capitol Hill, they would be captured by cameras. And these were things that, you know, maybe they could, initially, that their constituents might be watching now that they can clip and send out in a newsletter, has the proliferation of television cameras on Capitol Hill over the past 40-plus years contributed to that performative politics that's, I would say, a big part of our problem today.

I don't know where the chicken and egg is on this issue. Without a doubt, politicians perform for the cameras, and that's not unique to Capitol Hill. It's happened. Every president since the dawn of the television camera has used television as a tool to, as a part of the bully pulpit, right? Until C-SPAN, Congress didn't really have that tool at their fingertips in the same way that a president did. Some may have thought that that would give presidency, the executive branch, perhaps an advantage in the power dynamic between branches. So yes, without a doubt, there's a performative nature, although I would also say that you either have cameras in these important spaces where these decisions are made and debated, or you don't. And I think in this day and age especially, that when you don't have cameras there, it leads to questions about what's really happening, what's the backroom deal, what's the, what are we not seeing? what are we not hearing about? I think, you know, today the Supreme Court is, allows audio,

live audio. So C-SPAN will now show the live, we'll broadcast oral arguments. And the way we do it, we have an audio feed, and then we have, we put up the picture of whoever is speaking. It's a little hard to keep track of sometimes. There's a, there's a producer behind the scenes trying to say, well, is that Sotomayor or is that Kagan? Is that Alito or is that Gorsuch? At any rate, we show it. it. But if you listen to those hearings and Dispatch now owns Scotus Blog, who does a better job of analyzing the court than anyone, if you listen to those arguments, they're brilliant, right? You, the Supreme Court has a very low approval rating right now, and yet if you listen to those arguments, you can't help but be impressed by every participant, the attorneys who are making

the arguments, all of the justices who are asking tough questions. I watched several, we carried several of the, uh, this past week's cases. And the justices questions were remarkable and impressive and they were doing their jobs. And I think if they were televised and more people could see what happens and the level of, of, uh, of, um, questioning and the argument and the, the way the Supreme Court operates, I think that the court would actually gain in, it's approval, if you will, the confidence of the people, but we don't. We don't have those cameras. I actually, I want them.

I sent a letter on behalf of C-SPAN to the Chief Justice last year seeking access for some of the most important Trump cases involving President Trump, because we thought that the public would benefit from seeing that. We didn't get a response and didn't expect to. We write that letter periodically every couple years. But I think it would be good for the court, and I think it would be good for the country. So I'll tell you one more little piece about Congress. In 1979, C-SPAN began broadcasting.

So we saw the House of Representatives for the first time. The Senate didn't join for another seven years. One of the senators, Robert Byrd, is a true institutionalist, and he really was opposed to it. And Brian Lamb tells the story that Robert Byrd told him that one of the reasons he, Robert Bird, changed his mind, is that several times people would walk up to him and mistake him for Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich was a backbench Republican member of Congress, but he had gray and white hair, not unlike Robert Bird's white hair. And people were mistaking Robert for Newt Gingrich, which suggested. to Robert Byrd that all of a sudden, the House of Representatives, the lower house in his mind,

had now an advantage in the minds of the public and was now becoming more influential in the public eye than his cherished United States Senate. And he changed his mind and allowed C-SPAN's cameras into the Senate, and they've been in the Senate ever since. That is fascinating. I mean, the, yeah, I mean, there could be studies done on that for for ages. I would say the flip side to that argument, the argument that you make, would be you ask, I think if we took a survey of the 535 people in Congress, or slightly fewer right now, I think, and ask them what are the most effective committees in Congress? I would wager, and they might all say committees that they serve on, of course, first. But if they were being honest about it, they would tell us that they're the intelligence.

committees in the House and the Senate. And those are the two places that do much less in front of the cameras. Is there, should we draw a causal relationship between those two facts? Maybe. That's an interesting point. I mean, there is much more comity between the members of those committees, although even that has gone by the wayside in the last couple of years, particularly during the period of the Russian investigation. They became, in many ways, as partisan, certainly in the House, as any other committee. I think it's about relationships. I think, you know, there have been times when other committees fared very well

because of the relationship of the chair and the ranking member. And I think those relationships are incredibly important, which is a little bit of what we're trying to demonstrate on ceasefire. Personal relationships matter. I think the other problem in Congress, which has nothing to do with cameras, is we have a, you know, most of the House representatives is members. are not in competitive seats. These are, you know, we have gerrymandered our country into a reality that we have five, 10, 15 competitive seats, certainly for the next election. And so that leads to

much more polarization than we have ever had because the emphasis is no longer on who is reaching towards the center. They're now reaching for the ideological polls because they need to win primaries, and that's how they get into Congress. So I don't think any of that has to do with cameras in Congress, I think that has to do with a sort of reimagining how we elect members of Congress and how successful the parties have become in chopping up the states into safe seats so that they can have an advantage in the number of members of Congress. So now we have fewer centrist members, almost none, and many far-left and far-right members, and that leads to extraordinary polarization in Congress. So there are

are a lot of reasons for, to explain where our politics are. No, I think that's right. How was C-SPAN funded? C-SPAN, you know, it's interesting. When I got to C-SPAN about a year ago, I learned that most people think that C-SPAN is publicly funded, which is not true. C-SPAN has never taken a dime of government funds. C-SPAN is privately funded. We are a nonprofit, 501-C-3, but we are privately funded, mostly by television distributors. So if you pay for your television channel lineup, if you have Fox and CNN and the Food Network and Discovery, you pay for a channel bundle. And C-SPAN, in almost every case, is in that lineup and has been since the beginning of cable TV. In fact, it was one of the very first cable TV channels. So a tiny little

sliver of your monthly cable bill goes to C-SPAN. And for just a few cents per month, you get three channels, C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, which carries the Senate. C-SPAN carries the House when they're in session, and C-SPAN 3 carries whatever, it may be a committee hearing, it may be the president, and then when the House and Senate are not in session, then we will use all three networks to cover whatever is available. Last week, the House was out of session. We had one day when the president was on C-SPAN-1, C-SPAN. The Senate was on C-SPAN 2, and the Supreme Court was on C-SPAN 3.

So we had live coverage of all three branches of government simultaneously. What can you tell us about your audience? What do you know about your audience? So we know that our audience, which is, we just got some research last week that is, it was heartening, and it made me feel very good about where we are in this current media ecosystem. The research that we got last week told us that our audience. is almost, almost perfectly matches the ideological divisions within America.

Our audience is 28% self-described conservative, 27% self-described liberal, 41% self-describe moderates. And that's basically where America is. And so that's our audience. And it's a bit of a unicorn in that respect, because most television outlets of all flavors, whether they're news channels or lifestyle channels, tend to have an audience make up that favors one side significantly or the other. But we don't. And that's for C-SPAN, that's good.

You have other shows that you're planning or developing or thinking about along the lines of C-Sfire? Or is that kind of a one-off and you're likely to continue to do the kinds of shows that C-SPAN has done traditionally? So our bread and butter, The most important thing that we do is cover the proceedings of the American government and those who are in the government, whether it's a committee hearing or it may be a panel discussion that they're having at a think tank. But the proceedings of the House, the Senate, the committee hearings, the president, the cabinet, the Supreme Court, the most important thing we do is cover those events live without editing them. Democracy unfiltered, if you will.

That's our bread and butter, and I think that's at the core of our mission. Now, you see live events happening during the week, during most of the sort of weekday hours. At night, there's less of that. And on the weekends, there's less of that. So what ceasefire is at night? We're going to air on Friday nights and Saturday and Sunday mornings. And that's an effort to put the week into context. On the weekends, we air other programs, book TV, you mentioned it.

We do book, we go to book festivals. We have book programs. we're launching a new program this very week called America's Book Club, which is hosted by David Rubenstein, a civic leader and avid reader, where we'll talk to an author about his or her body of work. So that will, that's a new program. But on the weekends, we cover book TV, we cover American History TV. We were just named the official media partner of America 250,

the commission that's putting together all of the, the commemorations and celebrations of our 250th birthday. So we will cover a lot of those events. This weekend, we're covering Navy 250 in Philadelphia. There's a boat parade. There are events. They're fireworks. There's a concert.

So we're covering that. We cover the Army 250 this summer. We'll cover all of the festivities. And sometimes these are reenactments, like at the Battle of Bunker Hill. And other times, they may be lectures about the Revolutionary War, about, you know, where we have come with the Declaration of Independence over the last 250 years. So we do that sort of programming as well. I would say, though, our bread and butter, the public events, the federal government public events,

and then we have a daily call-in show called Washington Journal. We bring on reporters and newsmakers. The Speaker of the House was a guest this past week, Mike Johnson. And made some news. And made some news. And we take calls from equal numbers from Republicans. Democrats, Independence, Real America, that I think it's valuable for our leaders to hear from folks across the country. Do you care about ratings? Do you get ratings? We do not get traditional

Nielsen ratings in the way that other television networks get them. I used to get them every morning at CNN, and you could see exactly what happened yesterday. We get, we have a sense of our audience. We get each month, we get an update on our audience across our networks. from something called ComScore, which people are familiar with. But we don't run advertisements as traditional television networks, too. We're ad-free. We are funded by television subscription fees. And so we're less concerned about how many people are watching in any given moment,

but we know that millions of people watch throughout the day, throughout the week. And for me, I'm not as concerned about how many people are watching at this moment, But I want to make sure that Americans know how to find us, that they do watch us, that we're presenting this content in a compelling way, because we want to be relevant and we want to have an impact. We think that we're doing something unique that nobody else is doing, and we want to make sure that folks take advantage of it. I read an interview with Brian Lambs. He's been founder recently. The interview is all the interview is. old. I read it recently, and he made the comment, and I'm paraphrasing here, that it was sort of liberating for him to not have to care if a particular show or moment on C-SPAN had four viewers at the time. Would that bother you if you were to get a report and you found out that something

had four viewers and it was, you know, seven o'clock at night or three in the afternoon? Do you, Will you think about that? Would that bother you? Would you say, I'm not going to do that again? That's a tough question. You know, I want to make sure that we're a public service, right? We're a nonprofit. We have a mission.

And I want to make sure that we're able to fulfill our mission. And part of that, I think, means we want to have an impact out there. And by impact, I mean, we want to make sure that the American public is able to see what we're covering. these events are national leaders. And so in that respect, if you want to have an impact, people need to watch. But I do not get caught up in, nor do I even know the audience numbers of any individual program. You know, sometimes people have said, well, do you care if it's interesting what you're putting on it? And I do care about that.

And we have to, like anyone else in journalism or the media, we need to find that perfect, or do are best to find a balance between what's interesting and what's important. I think that what's happening in Washington right now is both interesting and incredibly important. So we don't have to work so hard, work too hard at that. But sure, we will, every day we have to make editorial choices. There are hundreds of public affairs events in both Washington and around the country that happen every day. And even though we have three television networks and quite a bit of airtime, we still have to make choices. And so we are always having that conversation looking for the balance between what's interesting and important. And usually we're able to check both of those boxes

at the same time. You mentioned that you used to get ratings every morning at CNN. You don't get that now. What are the other ways in which your job as CEO of C-SPAN is different from the positions that you held sort of at or near the top of CNN's Washington Bureau for the, I mean, I mean, for the last couple decades? So my last role at CNN was the Washington Bureau Chief, and CNN's Washington Bureau is the largest news bureau in the world. Hundreds and hundreds of people, lots of programming comes out of the Washington Bureau, and the CNN Washington Bureau is responsible for all of the political coverage across the country,

coverage of U.S. foreign policy, everything happens in Washington as well. As the Washington Bureau Chief, I was responsible for managing, that, but one of the things that's very different is I was responsible for spending the money that it took to cover all of, it's very expensive to produce television news. I wasn't really the person responsible for the revenue. That was somebody else. At C-SPAN, I'm responsible for all of it. So not only the content, but also it's a business. We have to We have to cover our expenses. We're not a for-profit business.

So now I'm responsible for all of that. And, of course, as you know, because you share a similar role with the dispatch, it's very different than just covering the news. Yeah. There's a lot more responsibility. There's a lot more responsibility. So you've got to, you have to make sure that you have the resources to do what it is that you do and to fulfill your mission.

And that's the CEO's responsibility, as you know. And so in that respect, it's very different than being an editor or a bureau chief at a large news organization like CNN. Are you looking at other revenue streams to supplement the subscriber pieces that you described earlier as sort of the main way of funding what C-SPAN does? Yeah, I think we are. You know, I mentioned that we're a 501C3. We do not get government funding.

But as a 501C3, we certainly could, if we choose to. We can raise money. We could have membership. We could have C-SPAN fans who donate to C-SPAN because they believe in our mission. maybe they'll get a tote bag like radio stations. We haven't really started that in earnest. You're welcome to contribute to C-SPAN. Go to our website and feel free to write a check.

But that hasn't been really part of our DNA for the last 45 years. And it's something that I'm certainly exploring as an opportunity to diversify our revenue streams. The media business is constantly changing. And certainly the TV business, the pay TV business, is changing fast. So for me, it's important to make sure that C-SPAN and our content is available for decades to come, even if the way Americans find their television change. For example, we just recently announced that we will soon be available on YouTube TV and Hulu Plus Live TV. These are the two largest streaming services that stream bundles.

of television networks. And it was important for us to be on those services, and we reached a green. That wasn't inevitable. Well, it hadn't happened for, I mean, those, we were not, when I got to C-SPAN, we were not on YouTube TV, and we were not on Hulu, but we will be this fall. And I think that's important because people, everybody doesn't necessarily watch their television through a traditional cable TV service anymore. And so, so that's a way that we are also evolving with the, with,

the marketplace. But for me, I want C-SPAN to be available on every device, every television. We're a public service. I think that what we do is valuable and important in this democracy. And so it's my job to make sure that we can fund our operation so that we can continue to do that and find even new ways to meet people where they consume their political video, where they consume their political news. This has been terrific. We need to get back to our conference. We're running at a time. Thanks for taking the time to talk to the dispatch, and we will be watching. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Steve. You know,