I want my C-SPAN

A few years ago, Brian Lamb, the founder and public face of C-SPAN, was asked during an interview about Newton Minow's famous indictment of American television. Since launching C-SPAN in the 1970s, he has pointed the cameras at the national political life, and made it both informative and profitable at the same time. C-SPAN may not make "cloture" a household word, but its growth refutes Minow's worst fears about market failure in the area of public interest programming. Television should be graded today not on taste, but on choice. By that measure, the marketplace looks a lot more robust than it was in 1961.