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Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

Good. C-SPAN cameras turned Congress into a show and I’m not convinced we’re better off for it.

Newt Gingrich realized that C-SPAN provided him a free 24-hour platform to talk about whatever he wanted on TV. He would go stand in the empty chambers and speak to the TV audience. It helped bring about the widening partisan divide we have today.

C-SPAN being known for its large audience glued to the TV screen all 24 hours?

No, certainly not a large audience, but some people. This was in the 80s and early 90s. It must be difficult to imagine if you've grown up with the Internet, but people didn't have instant access to an infinite amount of content with them in their pocket all the time.

If you had basic cable, you got maybe 13 channels, one of which was C-SPAN, plus 3-5 local networks. Some of those would go off the air during the night. Others would be showing infomercials or bad movies or just whatever they had laying around. There was not a lot of competition at the time.

So if you were working the night shift, or an insomniac, or just up late watching TV for some reason, there was a decent chance that it would be one of maybe 5 things available to watch.

And hey, all those people get to vote. So if you want to influence them to vote a certain way, why not go talk to them when you're not really competing for their attention with anything else?

No, but it provides a wealth of raw footage to edit and play for the TV media, ads and today, with the Internet.

A certain UK politician did this in the EU parliament. Would turn up, make a speech in the middle of a debate, then leave. The speech had nothing to do with the subject of the debate but it could be put on YouTube later.

I like C-SPAN. It gives us a fairly pure insight into what the government is doing. I can literally keep an eye on them. I see all the stuff the news doesn't report and I also get to see the news before it gets filtered through corporate media.

Plus you are probably the second person I know who thinks C-SPAN is a show. The first person is me. The consensus in America seems to be that C-SPAN is too boring and so many won't watch it.

It provides pure insight into what happens on the floor. Therefore substantive business does not happen on the floor anymore. The floor is now a stage, and what happens is theater. All real business happens in private meetings and conversations, and those meetings are overwhelmingly segregated by party, hence the increasing polarization, because members from opposing parties rarely have personal relationships anymore.

And to add to this, the only thing that’s going to get you to pure insight is if you literally read these bills and proposals line by line and identify what interests or platforms are being pushed. Who amongst us does this? Desperately need annotated cliff notes for congressional bills, as the current media has a symbiotic relationship with the party spin narratives and cannot give anything other than the dramatic non-substantive take on matters.

Check out C-SPANs website. They have a neat bill tracker which makes understanding the debates between legislatures easier.

People in America complain about how biased our media is. I remind them that until they start watching C-SPAN instead of CNN for American politics that they are part of "the problem"

I love C-SPAN and think that it is a significant public good.

What you see on camera isn’t a pure anything, it’s just pure obfuscation and deflection. The cameras are rolling and while they’re rolling that’s the time to score points. That’s no way for a deliberative body to do politics.

It sounds like we need more transparency. No where to hide. If the government's conduct is always "good enough for TV" then I think we will have less problems.

Not sure how you take that away unless you want Congress to do literally nothing except showboat and pass continuing resolutions. Might as well shut the operation down and save the taxpayers some money but then we’re not a Republic anymore.

Doesn't sound so bad. The consequences for past government secrets have been pretty dire. Some really atrocious stuff happens when no one's looking, Abu Ghraib for example. Observation is an important part of keeping the government in line. One of the reasons the recent whale jail incident went over so smoothly was because multiple individuals connected to the global media were on-site observing the situation and reporting to the whole of Russia as well as the international community. Had those observers been absent, the behavior of the national administration as well as the local government in Primorsky would have been different.

Broadcast through PEG access channels such as C-SPAN lowers barriers to observation.

If you don’t want Congress to do political work, if you just want a taxpayer funded political drama to watch in your off hours, then you and I my friend are going to have to disagree.

Politics isn’t pretty, you can put some lipstick on that pig but it’s still a pig, and has a pig’s nature. Maybe there’s still something to work with though, you want a high bandwidth window of observation, and I don’t want to throw accountability out the window entirely, just C-SPAN.

I want the smoke filled rooms and the backroom deals to come back because those are signs of a Congress that is putting the legwork in and not rolling over for the President.

I think everybody wants to know that there’s a Rep working for them on the floor, even if they can’t watch the floor and watch perfectly edited clips to show mountains where there are only mole hills and vice versa.

How do we all get what we want here? I’ve got some ideas, but maybe you have some too.

Please give me one example of something you want your congress to do, that they would not be willing to do on national TV?

Negotiate.

Now this is just my opinion: I think you might be losing your grip on reality. We seem to be observing the same thing, and forming two different conclusions. Not really sure what to do in situations like this, where there is no consensus on reality itself. I have observed negotiation happening on C-SPAN with my own eyes...

Maybe we just have different definitions for "negotiation". Please would you like to tell what happens in a negotiation, so I can better understand?

Are you sure your grip on reality is so tight that you can judge the state of another man’s head?

What happens on C-SPAN is a lot of posturing for the camera. The real negotiations, if they happen at all, happen between the Speaker, the President pro Tempe, the President and whoever the party whips have to cajole on that vote. That part doesn’t happen on the floors of the House and the Senate anymore because nothing hits the floors without the Speaker or the President pro Tempe signing off on it, and they’ll sign off on something even if they know it has no chance of passing just to try and score points with the base.

I tend to agree with you. Too often politicians are playing to the cameras hoping for a soundbite rather than engaging in substantive debate.

Would conducting legislative business via IRC (or text-only Slack/Discord) be a substantive improvement?

(or would legislators wind up texting A/S/L and deploying filibuster bots?)

Everything would be the same except it's not recorded. A transcript can provide transparency but would be much harder to sensationalize.

I've never voted, never will. Mainly because politicians don't really debate: that being, to convince an opposition to change their minds. I know sometimes politicians have gone against their party's wishes, but I can't see those being as a result of a well constructed idea from the opposition.

From what I can tell, there's plenty of that kind of debating done in German politics. Especially also because coalition governments are the norm.

Would you vote there?

This may have some truth in national politics, but state and certainly local politics have much more substantive discussions.

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