Category: reason

How Biased Are We, Really?

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Viking, 352 pages, $28

A famous song from Avenue Q, the celebrated Broadway puppet musical, nicely sums up what we’ve been told about racism for the last two decades or so: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”

This notion, which escaped from the confines of academic social psychology and other fields in the 1990s, has dominated the national debate about racism ever since. When it comes to psychology’s treatment of the subject, that’s largely because of the runaway popularity of the implicit association test (IAT), a computerized quiz that supposedly reveals your level of unconscious bias against marginalized groups. It also reflects a broader infatuation with “social priming” research, which is centered on the idea that human behavior can be powerfully influenced by subtle cues, even ones we aren’t consciously aware that our mind has processed.

Social priming hit its stride at John Bargh’s New York University lab in the late 1990s (he’s now at Yale), while the IAT was introduced in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji, presently the chair of Harvard’s psychology department. The early years of the 21st century were very good for both: Social-priming researchers published some sexy, surprising findings, and the IAT quickly established itself as the way for sophisticated people to talk about race in America.

Implicit bias tells a compelling and straightforward story about why racially discriminatory outcomes in America persist: Many people think they’re racial egalitarians, but deep down they’re not. And their implicit bias manifests itself in countless ways, helping to reinforce America’s racial hierarchy by infecting everything from police conduct to real estate agents’ treatment of potential homeowners.

There is ample empirical evidence that implicit bias exists. Plus, you would expect it to exist, theoretically speaking—the human brain evolved to filter out the universe’s cacophony of information by quickly and often sloppily carving things up into categories, and it often then jumps to conclusions based on those categories. But there are many unanswered questions about what percentage of the discriminatory-outcome “pie” can be attributed to implicit bias. Many of the other potential culprits—ossified segregation patterns in housing and schooling, for example—can be explained entirely (or almost entirely) without any reference to implicit bias.

Making things even more complicated, the study of implicit bias has hit some serious roadblocks lately. The IAT, upon further review, doesn’t do a good job of predicting behavior, which was the main reason for its original appeal. (To be clear, that’s a separate question from whether implicit bias actually exists.) More broadly, the replication crisis presently rocking psychology—in which attempts to rerun various classic experiments are failing left and right, suggesting the initial results may have been false positives—has hit social priming particularly hard.

Onto this rather fraught landscape steps the Stanford psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner for her work on racial bias. In Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Eberhardt offers a tour of the modern study of race and racism. The book mixes summaries of empirical findings, reflections from her own life and work, and interviews with those who are, in one way or another, on the front line of American race relations, from a black police officer observing the effects of bigotry from within a department to Charlottesville counterprotesters trying to figure out how best to respond to explicit prejudice.

At its best, Biased unblinkingly explains the sheer complexity of solving tangled race-related problems in the United States. Many of its most insightful and useful parts don’t even come from social psychology. Eberhardt correctly highlights, for example, that the bail and plea-bargaining system is a disaster for those without money, who are disproportionately people of color. “Being behind bars for months awaiting trial can unravel a life” for someone without the means to get out on bail. That has the effect of coercing the poor into accepting plea deals on lesser charges, which in turn can “saddle them with a criminal conviction that has lifelong consequences, limiting where they can live, what jobs they can perform, their ability to vote, and their eligibility for college student loans.” And those convictions often bring some prison time anyway: “Black defendants are more likely than whites, Asians, or Latinos to be offered plea deals that require prison time, particularly for drug-related crimes. Blacks are also more likely to rely on the free public defender system, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage.” Simply hiring a private attorney, she explains, increases by about half the probability of defendants having the “primary charge against them reduced.”

Eberhardt also presents some difficult-to-refute findings about the role of implicit bias in the real world, including famous studies in which identical résumés are sent out with white- and black-sounding names (with the white ones getting far more callbacks) and another famous experiment in which a screen shielding performers’ identities during auditions led to more gender parity in previously male-dominated orchestra hiring. The results of these tight, elegant experiments suggest that implicit bias is at least part of the equation. And in some cases they offer clear partial solutions, such as shielding certain identifying information about job applicants and focusing more on tests of ability to perform the tasks required by a position.

But parts of Biased reflect forms of error and overreach that are presently rampant across social psychology. Much as John Bargh’s 2017 social-priming book Before You Know It didn’t even grapple with the existence of the replication crisis, for example, Eberhardt is simply too credulous about certain shaky-seeming social-priming claims. A neophyte reader wouldn’t come away with the sense that there had been any real debate over the IAT, let alone that its founders admitted in 2015 that it’s too statistically noisy to diagnose test takers at the individual level. Instead, she describes it as “more sensitive [than a survey] and designed to measure associations we don’t even know we have.”

Social psychology also has a habit of overextrapolating from rather thin experimental results, and Eberhardt occasionally falls victim to this in Biased. The most telling example comes when she describes an experiment where participants watched scenes from TV shows such as CSI and Grey’s Anatomy in which “characters [like] doctors, police officers, and scientists” had been edited out. Participants unfamiliar with the shows were then asked to rate the likability of the edited-out characters based on how the (still-visible) characters around them acted toward them, and based on transcripts of the show’s dialogue. Participants consistently “perceived the unseen black characters in these popular shows to be less liked and treated less positively than the unseen white ones,” she writes. The researchers further reported a correlation between exposure to the clips and high IAT scores. From this, Eberhardt extrapolates that “just as bias leaks out between the words of scripted dialogue, it seeps out of all of us in our everyday lives, in ways that are difficult to name and evaluate.”

The idea is that even when black characters are explicitly presented in a positive light, they can still trigger and spread implicit bias. But if you look at the study itself, it’s a real stretch to see how it could offer any evidence for such an alarming claim. For one thing, “favorable nonverbal response”—the sense that the other characters’ body language, gestures, and so on indicated positive feelings about the edited-out character—was the only category of six in which a statistically significant difference was noted between the treatment of black and white characters. And that difference was small (just 0.2 points on a six-point scale, or about a 3 percent difference in the perceived nonverbal treatment of fictional characters) and barely significant at that. When it came to perceptions of attractiveness, sociability, kindness, intelligence, and favorable verbal responses, no statistically significant differences were detected. Does one-for-six indicate an important finding, or is it just the inevitable result, statistically speaking, of testing a lot of different stuff?

The study also correlates real-life exposure to the (unedited) shows with high IAT scores—a strange finding when you think about it. We’re buffeted with huge amounts of information every day. Why would a single show we see maybe once a week be correlated meaningfully with implicit bias? It gets even more questionable when you consider that exposure to clips in another study appeared to lead to immediate increases in anti-black racism as measured by the IAT. So the scores are both jumping around in response to recent stimuli and correlated, in a longer-term way, with occasional exposure to those same stimuli?

Social psychology is only going to right its ship if social psychologists stare the problem straight in the face and are willing to discuss it openly. As informative and engaging as Biased is, when it comes to its treatment of its own discipline, it seems to suffer from a bit of—well, you know.

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How Biased Are We, Really?

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Viking, 352 pages, $28

A famous song from Avenue Q, the celebrated Broadway puppet musical, nicely sums up what we’ve been told about racism for the last two decades or so: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”

This notion, which escaped from the confines of academic social psychology and other fields in the 1990s, has dominated the national debate about racism ever since. When it comes to psychology’s treatment of the subject, that’s largely because of the runaway popularity of the implicit association test (IAT), a computerized quiz that supposedly reveals your level of unconscious bias against marginalized groups. It also reflects a broader infatuation with “social priming” research, which is centered on the idea that human behavior can be powerfully influenced by subtle cues, even ones we aren’t consciously aware that our mind has processed.

Social priming hit its stride at John Bargh’s New York University lab in the late 1990s (he’s now at Yale), while the IAT was introduced in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji, presently the chair of Harvard’s psychology department. The early years of the 21st century were very good for both: Social-priming researchers published some sexy, surprising findings, and the IAT quickly established itself as the way for sophisticated people to talk about race in America.

Implicit bias tells a compelling and straightforward story about why racially discriminatory outcomes in America persist: Many people think they’re racial egalitarians, but deep down they’re not. And their implicit bias manifests itself in countless ways, helping to reinforce America’s racial hierarchy by infecting everything from police conduct to real estate agents’ treatment of potential homeowners.

There is ample empirical evidence that implicit bias exists. Plus, you would expect it to exist, theoretically speaking—the human brain evolved to filter out the universe’s cacophony of information by quickly and often sloppily carving things up into categories, and it often then jumps to conclusions based on those categories. But there are many unanswered questions about what percentage of the discriminatory-outcome “pie” can be attributed to implicit bias. Many of the other potential culprits—ossified segregation patterns in housing and schooling, for example—can be explained entirely (or almost entirely) without any reference to implicit bias.

Making things even more complicated, the study of implicit bias has hit some serious roadblocks lately. The IAT, upon further review, doesn’t do a good job of predicting behavior, which was the main reason for its original appeal. (To be clear, that’s a separate question from whether implicit bias actually exists.) More broadly, the replication crisis presently rocking psychology—in which attempts to rerun various classic experiments are failing left and right, suggesting the initial results may have been false positives—has hit social priming particularly hard.

Onto this rather fraught landscape steps the Stanford psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner for her work on racial bias. In Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Eberhardt offers a tour of the modern study of race and racism. The book mixes summaries of empirical findings, reflections from her own life and work, and interviews with those who are, in one way or another, on the front line of American race relations, from a black police officer observing the effects of bigotry from within a department to Charlottesville counterprotesters trying to figure out how best to respond to explicit prejudice.

At its best, Biased unblinkingly explains the sheer complexity of solving tangled race-related problems in the United States. Many of its most insightful and useful parts don’t even come from social psychology. Eberhardt correctly highlights, for example, that the bail and plea-bargaining system is a disaster for those without money, who are disproportionately people of color. “Being behind bars for months awaiting trial can unravel a life” for someone without the means to get out on bail. That has the effect of coercing the poor into accepting plea deals on lesser charges, which in turn can “saddle them with a criminal conviction that has lifelong consequences, limiting where they can live, what jobs they can perform, their ability to vote, and their eligibility for college student loans.” And those convictions often bring some prison time anyway: “Black defendants are more likely than whites, Asians, or Latinos to be offered plea deals that require prison time, particularly for drug-related crimes. Blacks are also more likely to rely on the free public defender system, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage.” Simply hiring a private attorney, she explains, increases by about half the probability of defendants having the “primary charge against them reduced.”

Eberhardt also presents some difficult-to-refute findings about the role of implicit bias in the real world, including famous studies in which identical résumés are sent out with white- and black-sounding names (with the white ones getting far more callbacks) and another famous experiment in which a screen shielding performers’ identities during auditions led to more gender parity in previously male-dominated orchestra hiring. The results of these tight, elegant experiments suggest that implicit bias is at least part of the equation. And in some cases they offer clear partial solutions, such as shielding certain identifying information about job applicants and focusing more on tests of ability to perform the tasks required by a position.

But parts of Biased reflect forms of error and overreach that are presently rampant across social psychology. Much as John Bargh’s 2017 social-priming book Before You Know It didn’t even grapple with the existence of the replication crisis, for example, Eberhardt is simply too credulous about certain shaky-seeming social-priming claims. A neophyte reader wouldn’t come away with the sense that there had been any real debate over the IAT, let alone that its founders admitted in 2015 that it’s too statistically noisy to diagnose test takers at the individual level. Instead, she describes it as “more sensitive [than a survey] and designed to measure associations we don’t even know we have.”

Social psychology also has a habit of overextrapolating from rather thin experimental results, and Eberhardt occasionally falls victim to this in Biased. The most telling example comes when she describes an experiment where participants watched scenes from TV shows such as CSI and Grey’s Anatomy in which “characters [like] doctors, police officers, and scientists” had been edited out. Participants unfamiliar with the shows were then asked to rate the likability of the edited-out characters based on how the (still-visible) characters around them acted toward them, and based on transcripts of the show’s dialogue. Participants consistently “perceived the unseen black characters in these popular shows to be less liked and treated less positively than the unseen white ones,” she writes. The researchers further reported a correlation between exposure to the clips and high IAT scores. From this, Eberhardt extrapolates that “just as bias leaks out between the words of scripted dialogue, it seeps out of all of us in our everyday lives, in ways that are difficult to name and evaluate.”

The idea is that even when black characters are explicitly presented in a positive light, they can still trigger and spread implicit bias. But if you look at the study itself, it’s a real stretch to see how it could offer any evidence for such an alarming claim. For one thing, “favorable nonverbal response”—the sense that the other characters’ body language, gestures, and so on indicated positive feelings about the edited-out character—was the only category of six in which a statistically significant difference was noted between the treatment of black and white characters. And that difference was small (just 0.2 points on a six-point scale, or about a 3 percent difference in the perceived nonverbal treatment of fictional characters) and barely significant at that. When it came to perceptions of attractiveness, sociability, kindness, intelligence, and favorable verbal responses, no statistically significant differences were detected. Does one-for-six indicate an important finding, or is it just the inevitable result, statistically speaking, of testing a lot of different stuff?

The study also correlates real-life exposure to the (unedited) shows with high IAT scores—a strange finding when you think about it. We’re buffeted with huge amounts of information every day. Why would a single show we see maybe once a week be correlated meaningfully with implicit bias? It gets even more questionable when you consider that exposure to clips in another study appeared to lead to immediate increases in anti-black racism as measured by the IAT. So the scores are both jumping around in response to recent stimuli and correlated, in a longer-term way, with occasional exposure to those same stimuli?

Social psychology is only going to right its ship if social psychologists stare the problem straight in the face and are willing to discuss it openly. As informative and engaging as Biased is, when it comes to its treatment of its own discipline, it seems to suffer from a bit of—well, you know.

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Antifa Mob Viciously Assaults Journalist Andy Ngo at Portland Rally

Andy Ngo, a photojournalist and editor at Quillette, landed in the emergency room after a mob of antifa activists attacked him on the streets of Portland during a Saturday afternoon demonstration.

The assailants wore black clothing and masks, and were engaged in a counter-protest against several right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. Ngo is a well-known chronicler of antifa activity, and has criticized their illiberal tactics on Fox News. He attended the protest in this capacity—as a journalist, covering a notable public event.

According to Ngo, his attacker stole his camera equipment. But video footage recorded by another journalist, The Oregonian‘s Jim Ryan, clearly shows an antifa activist punching Ngo in the face. Others throw milkshakes at him:

Throwing milkshakes at right-wing politicians is a tactic of British progressive activists that recently traveled to this side of the Atlantic. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) was hit with one earlier in June. The tactic has its defenders in mainstream left-of-center media as well: Vox‘s Carlos Maza tweeted “milkshake them all” after a British activist hurled a milkshake at Nigel Farage.

Portland police have claimed that some of the milkshakes thrown by the antifa activists on Saturday contained quick-dry cement. That may or may not be true. What is true is that an antifa mob beat up a journalist—one who is harshly critical of them, to be sure, but who posed no physical threat to them and was only there to document their activities—on a public street. This is indefensible, and yet there are tons of progressive-leaning people currently defending it, or at the very least rationalizing and making light of it.

Antifa, of course, rejects the notion that violence should only be used in response to a physical threat. The group believes that the very existence of far-right people, groups, and ideas is a kind of provocation that justifies violence—against the far-right, and against their enablers. (For more about the ideology, tactics, and goals of the movement, order my new book, Panic Attack; Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which includes an entire chapter on antifa.)

I have reached out to Ngo for comment and will update this post if I hear back. A disoriented and clearly injured Ngo posted to his Twitter page here.

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Antifa Mob Viciously Assaults Journalist Andy Ngo at Portland Rally

Andy Ngo, a photojournalist and editor at Quillette, landed in the emergency room after a mob of antifa activists attacked him on the streets of Portland during a Saturday afternoon demonstration.

The assailants wore black clothing and masks, and were engaged in a counter-protest against several right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. Ngo is a well-known chronicler of antifa activity, and has criticized their illiberal tactics on Fox News. He attended the protest in this capacity—as a journalist, covering a notable public event.

According to Ngo, his attacker stole his camera equipment. But video footage recorded by another journalist, The Oregonian‘s Jim Ryan, clearly shows an antifa activist punching Ngo in the face. Others throw milkshakes at him:

Throwing milkshakes at right-wing politicians is a tactic of British progressive activists that recently traveled to this side of the Atlantic. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) was hit with one earlier in June. The tactic has its defenders in mainstream left-of-center media as well: Vox‘s Carlos Maza tweeted “milkshake them all” after a British activist hurled a milkshake at Nigel Farage.

Portland police have claimed that some of the milkshakes thrown by the antifa activists on Saturday contained quick-dry cement. That may or may not be true. What is true is that an antifa mob beat up a journalist—one who is harshly critical of them, to be sure, but who posed no physical threat to them and was only there to document their activities—on a public street. This is indefensible, and yet there are tons of progressive-leaning people currently defending it, or at the very least rationalizing and making light of it.

Antifa, of course, rejects the notion that violence should only be used in response to a physical threat. The group believes that the very existence of far-right people, groups, and ideas is a kind of provocation that justifies violence—against the far-right, and against their enablers. (For more about the ideology, tactics, and goals of the movement, order my new book, Panic Attack; Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which includes an entire chapter on antifa.)

I have reached out to Ngo for comment and will update this post if I hear back. A disoriented and clearly injured Ngo posted to his Twitter page here.

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Federal Court Rules Against Trump in Border Wall Cases

Yesterday, Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California issued two rulings against President Trump’s effort to reallocate military funds to build his proposed border wall. The decisions conclude that Trump lacked the authority to transfer those funds without additional authorization by Congress. The rulings address lawsuits against the border wall brought by the Sierra Club and other groups, and by the states of California and New Mexico, respectively.

These decisions come as  no surprise because they largely build on the reasoning of Judge Gilliam’s earlier decision to issue a preliminary injunction against the use of these funds for wall-building projects in areas of the border covered by the lawsuit in question. I analyzed it here. The principal differences are that the new rulings establish permanent injunctions against the use of the funds, not just a temporary injunction, and that they apply to wall-building in several more parts of the border area than the earlier injunction covered. Judge Gilliam explains that this is because there is now a more extensive record on what the federal government proposes to do in these additional areas.

I agree with Judge Gilliam’s analysis of the main issues in these cases, and explained the reasons why in my post on his earlier ruling (which has much more detail on the legal issues). The administration’s attempted diversion is a threat to separation of powers and would set a dangerous precedent if upheld by the courts. Conservatives who may cheer Trump’s efforts now won’t be so happy when the next Democratic president uses similar shenanigans to reallocate funds to projects favored by the political left.

As I also noted in that post, these decisions are just the start of what will almost certainly be a prolonged legal battle over Trump’s wall-building plans. The government is already appealing Judge Gilliam’s earlier ruling, and there are also numerous other pending lawsuits related to the wall.

For reasons discussed in my earlier post, Judge Gilliam’s rulings do not address several issues that are likely to come up in other wall-related cases. These include whether the situation at the border qualifies as “national emergency” under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (whose invocation was necessary to trigger the use of some of the funds Trumps wants to access), and whether the president has the authority to use eminent domain to seize property for border wall construction not specifically authorized by Congress.

Judge Gilliam is the first federal judge to address (some of) the substantive issues at stake in the wall litigation. But, earlier this month, another federal trial court dismissed a wall lawsuit filed by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives because the judge concluded the House lacked standing to file the claim. I criticized that ruling (which is also likely to be appealed) here.

Even if the standing decision stands up on appeal, it is unlikely to prevent judicial review of Trump’s wall-building plan, because there are many other lawsuits against it brought by parties who clearly do have standing, even if the House does not. The real import of the standing decision is its potential impact on other separation-of-powers disputes between the president and Congress.

To briefly sum up, Judge Gilliam’s decisions represent a notable victory for critics of Trump’s wall-building plan. But this is just the beginning of what is likely to be a lengthy legal battle. Stay tuned!

 

 

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Federal Court Rules Against Trump in Border Wall Cases

Yesterday, Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California issued two rulings against President Trump’s effort to reallocate military funds to build his proposed border wall. The decisions conclude that Trump lacked the authority to transfer those funds without additional authorization by Congress. The rulings address lawsuits against the border wall brought by the Sierra Club and other groups, and by the states of California and New Mexico, respectively.

These decisions come as  no surprise because they largely build on the reasoning of Judge Gilliam’s earlier decision to issue a preliminary injunction against the use of these funds for wall-building projects in areas of the border covered by the lawsuit in question. I analyzed it here. The principal differences are that the new rulings establish permanent injunctions against the use of the funds, not just a temporary injunction, and that they apply to wall-building in several more parts of the border area than the earlier injunction covered. Judge Gilliam explains that this is because there is now a more extensive record on what the federal government proposes to do in these additional areas.

I agree with Judge Gilliam’s analysis of the main issues in these cases, and explained the reasons why in my post on his earlier ruling (which has much more detail on the legal issues). The administration’s attempted diversion is a threat to separation of powers and would set a dangerous precedent if upheld by the courts. Conservatives who may cheer Trump’s efforts now won’t be so happy when the next Democratic president uses similar shenanigans to reallocate funds to projects favored by the political left.

As I also noted in that post, these decisions are just the start of what will almost certainly be a prolonged legal battle over Trump’s wall-building plans. The government is already appealing Judge Gilliam’s earlier ruling, and there are also numerous other pending lawsuits related to the wall.

For reasons discussed in my earlier post, Judge Gilliam’s rulings do not address several issues that are likely to come up in other wall-related cases. These include whether the situation at the border qualifies as “national emergency” under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (whose invocation was necessary to trigger the use of some of the funds Trumps wants to access), and whether the president has the authority to use eminent domain to seize property for border wall construction not specifically authorized by Congress.

Judge Gilliam is the first federal judge to address (some of) the substantive issues at stake in the wall litigation. But, earlier this month, another federal trial court dismissed a wall lawsuit filed by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives because the judge concluded the House lacked standing to file the claim. I criticized that ruling (which is also likely to be appealed) here.

Even if the standing decision stands up on appeal, it is unlikely to prevent judicial review of Trump’s wall-building plan, because there are many other lawsuits against it brought by parties who clearly do have standing, even if the House does not. The real import of the standing decision is its potential impact on other separation-of-powers disputes between the president and Congress.

To briefly sum up, Judge Gilliam’s decisions represent a notable victory for critics of Trump’s wall-building plan. But this is just the beginning of what is likely to be a lengthy legal battle. Stay tuned!

 

 

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Massachusetts Lawmakers Want To Crack Down on Beer Gardens

Boston’s beloved beer gardens are in jeopardy thanks to a bill introduced by Massachusetts lawmakers earlier this year. The bill, An Act Relative to One Day Alcoholic Beverage Licenses, would curtail (and perhaps derail) the ability of many breweries to operate beer gardens in the state. 

“Pop-up beer gardens have been flourishing in Boston,” noted American Craft Beer earlier this year. “But now the restaurant lobby is working with politicians to put the squeeze on them.”

Boy, are they. In fact, the licensing bill was written by Bob Luz, the president and CEO of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association.

The restaurant association is particularly opposed to the comparatively low cost of beer garden licenses—which run under $100 per day—and by the ease with which breweries currently may skirt a frivolous cap on the number of such licenses that can be issued to a business: “[B]reweries and others can skirt that provision by simply having different employees apply for the permits,” Boston.com reported this week.

A Boston magazine feature this spring lamented the fact that restaurants are “waging war” on beer gardens in the state and seeking “to regulate [them] into oblivion.”

“For the past year, Boston’s restaurateurs have been seething with envy as beer-garden mania has rapidly taken hold, and they’re now preparing to wage war,” the magazine reports. “At the State House, the restaurant industry is backing a proposed limit on one-day licenses for outdoor drinking to 14 a year per company, which would close a loophole that allows permitted beer-garden operators to stay open all summer long.”

Beer gardens have quickly reshaped and improved Boston’s summer drinking scene. Since debuting in the city in 2017, they’ve become, says writer Jeff Bernstone, “an indisputable fixture of city life.” Last year American Craft Beer dubbed Boston “America’s Beer Garden Capital.”

According to Boston.com, the city currently boasts nine beer gardens, with about the same number operating outside the city. This summer has also seen the debut of the first wine garden in the city.

The draw of a beer garden is obvious. Drinking outside is the best thing about both drinking and being outdoors. Beer gardens are fun. A typical pop-up beer garden might run several nights each week, and feature games, music, food trucks, and—of course—beer. They’re a great use of underutilized space. Beer gardens typically pop up in a vacant lot or a strip of public park. Many are family friendly. Kids and pets are often welcome. Others have embraced high culture. Tree House Brewing, the top-rated brewery in Massachusetts, is featuring musicians from the famed Berklee College of Music at its beer garden.

Beer gardens aren’t just good for drinkers. They’re good for Boston itself. The Boston magazine piece notes that they generate revenue for the city’s parks department and are “doing wonders for our city’s stodgy reputation.”

But the stodgy restaurant association says restaurateurs spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for alcohol licenses, and that beer gardens—what with their cheap licenses and low overhead—enjoy an unfair competitive advantage.

Yet the restaurateurs complaining about an uneven playing field don’t appear even to be interested in taking the field. After all, restaurants are free to apply for the same one-day beer garden licenses they’re moaning about breweries using.

(Well, this is the same Massachusetts Restaurant Association, after all, that’s a longtime opponent of lifting the state’s ridiculous ban on happy hour drink specials.)

State Sen. Nick Collins, who co-sponsored the bill to kill beer gardens, says he introduced it to “jump-start a conversation about [beer gardens’] long term sustainability.”

I’d hope Sen. Collins, a lawmaker, would know the difference between legislation and conversation. I encourage Sen. Collins and his co-sponsor, State Sen. Ed Kennedy, to “jump-start a conversation” with one another about what appears to be the only real obstacle to the “long term sustainability” of beer gardens in Massachusetts: lawmakers.

If there are problems with booze laws in Massachusetts, the state has only its lawmakers (certainly not just Sen. Kennedy or Sen. Collins) to blame. If seasonal liquor licenses sound like a solution, it’s one that lawmakers have foreclosed upon. As WGBH reported this spring, “seasonal liquor licenses aren’t available in Boston, thanks to a decades-old state law that bans the city from issuing them.”

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, very much to his credit, has taken a firm stand against any beer garden crackdown. Walsh also wants more liquor licensees in the city.

In the aforementioned Boston magazine piece, staff writer Spencer Buell closes with a stern warning against cracking down on beer gardens. Instead, he writes, the state should look to reform the alcohol licensing process for restaurants.

He’s right. When innovators help expose the inanity and uselessness of a set of regulations, the solution isn’t to subject more businesses to the bad rules but to scrap them altogether.

This echoes a suggestion I made in Reason in 2011, when restaurant associations were (more) busily trying to force cities to stifle completion from mobile food trucks.

“Instead of cracking down on the successful food trucks,” I wrote, “[cities] should look to those businesses’ success as a reason to cut the red tape that engulfs entrepreneurs who want to launch brick-and-mortar restaurants.“

If lawmakers really want a conversation starter, they can start right there.

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Massachusetts Lawmakers Want To Crack Down on Beer Gardens

Boston’s beloved beer gardens are in jeopardy thanks to a bill introduced by Massachusetts lawmakers earlier this year. The bill, An Act Relative to One Day Alcoholic Beverage Licenses, would curtail (and perhaps derail) the ability of many breweries to operate beer gardens in the state. 

“Pop-up beer gardens have been flourishing in Boston,” noted American Craft Beer earlier this year. “But now the restaurant lobby is working with politicians to put the squeeze on them.”

Boy, are they. In fact, the licensing bill was written by Bob Luz, the president and CEO of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association.

The restaurant association is particularly opposed to the comparatively low cost of beer garden licenses—which run under $100 per day—and by the ease with which breweries currently may skirt a frivolous cap on the number of such licenses that can be issued to a business: “[B]reweries and others can skirt that provision by simply having different employees apply for the permits,” Boston.com reported this week.

A Boston magazine feature this spring lamented the fact that restaurants are “waging war” on beer gardens in the state and seeking “to regulate [them] into oblivion.”

“For the past year, Boston’s restaurateurs have been seething with envy as beer-garden mania has rapidly taken hold, and they’re now preparing to wage war,” the magazine reports. “At the State House, the restaurant industry is backing a proposed limit on one-day licenses for outdoor drinking to 14 a year per company, which would close a loophole that allows permitted beer-garden operators to stay open all summer long.”

Beer gardens have quickly reshaped and improved Boston’s summer drinking scene. Since debuting in the city in 2017, they’ve become, says writer Jeff Bernstone, “an indisputable fixture of city life.” Last year American Craft Beer dubbed Boston “America’s Beer Garden Capital.”

According to Boston.com, the city currently boasts nine beer gardens, with about the same number operating outside the city. This summer has also seen the debut of the first wine garden in the city.

The draw of a beer garden is obvious. Drinking outside is the best thing about both drinking and being outdoors. Beer gardens are fun. A typical pop-up beer garden might run several nights each week, and feature games, music, food trucks, and—of course—beer. They’re a great use of underutilized space. Beer gardens typically pop up in a vacant lot or a strip of public park. Many are family friendly. Kids and pets are often welcome. Others have embraced high culture. Tree House Brewing, the top-rated brewery in Massachusetts, is featuring musicians from the famed Berklee College of Music at its beer garden.

Beer gardens aren’t just good for drinkers. They’re good for Boston itself. The Boston magazine piece notes that they generate revenue for the city’s parks department and are “doing wonders for our city’s stodgy reputation.”

But the stodgy restaurant association says restaurateurs spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for alcohol licenses, and that beer gardens—what with their cheap licenses and low overhead—enjoy an unfair competitive advantage.

Yet the restaurateurs complaining about an uneven playing field don’t appear even to be interested in taking the field. After all, restaurants are free to apply for the same one-day beer garden licenses they’re moaning about breweries using.

(Well, this is the same Massachusetts Restaurant Association, after all, that’s a longtime opponent of lifting the state’s ridiculous ban on happy hour drink specials.)

State Sen. Nick Collins, who co-sponsored the bill to kill beer gardens, says he introduced it to “jump-start a conversation about [beer gardens’] long term sustainability.”

I’d hope Sen. Collins, a lawmaker, would know the difference between legislation and conversation. I encourage Sen. Collins and his co-sponsor, State Sen. Ed Kennedy, to “jump-start a conversation” with one another about what appears to be the only real obstacle to the “long term sustainability” of beer gardens in Massachusetts: lawmakers.

If there are problems with booze laws in Massachusetts, the state has only its lawmakers (certainly not just Sen. Kennedy or Sen. Collins) to blame. If seasonal liquor licenses sound like a solution, it’s one that lawmakers have foreclosed upon. As WGBH reported this spring, “seasonal liquor licenses aren’t available in Boston, thanks to a decades-old state law that bans the city from issuing them.”

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, very much to his credit, has taken a firm stand against any beer garden crackdown. Walsh also wants more liquor licensees in the city.

In the aforementioned Boston magazine piece, staff writer Spencer Buell closes with a stern warning against cracking down on beer gardens. Instead, he writes, the state should look to reform the alcohol licensing process for restaurants.

He’s right. When innovators help expose the inanity and uselessness of a set of regulations, the solution isn’t to subject more businesses to the bad rules but to scrap them altogether.

This echoes a suggestion I made in Reason in 2011, when restaurant associations were (more) busily trying to force cities to stifle completion from mobile food trucks.

“Instead of cracking down on the successful food trucks,” I wrote, “[cities] should look to those businesses’ success as a reason to cut the red tape that engulfs entrepreneurs who want to launch brick-and-mortar restaurants.“

If lawmakers really want a conversation starter, they can start right there.

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How Vietnam Gave Us C-SPAN 

On May 19, 2019, a major era in American media and politics quietly ended. Brian Lamb made his final official weekly* appearance on C-SPAN, the public affairs television network he launched 40 years ago. Fittingly, that last show was an in-depth interview with historian David McCullough, whose work often chronicles how previously underappreciated figures such as Harry Truman and John Adams radically transformed American history.

The 77-year-old Lamb could be one of McCullough’s protagonists. He didn’t just anticipate our era of transparency, in which governments, corporations, and other institutions are held accountable to an extent once unimaginable; he helped to create that era by effectively turning surveillance cameras on Congress. In 1979, C-SPAN started broadcasting live coverage of the United States House of Representatives. Long before reality TV shows such as Real World, Survivor, the Real Housewives franchise, and Sober House entered the zeitgeist, C-SPAN gave Americans direct, unmediated access to one of the most powerful groups of people on the planet. For the first time in history, we could see our elected representatives arguing, wheeling and dealing, and literally falling asleep during debates over federal budgets, foreign policy, tax plans, and much more.

In 1986, C-SPAN started covering the Senate in a similar fashion, giving us unadulterated views of confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justices, cabinet secretaries, and other high-level appointees. Other programming—ranging from live, comprehensive coverage of the Iowa caucuses to bus tours of presidential libraries and other off-the-beaten-track locales to hourslong interviews with authors, policy makers, and politicians—soon followed.

C-SPAN famously doesn’t pay attention to ratings, because Lamb has long suspected that data on audience size would subconsciously redirect attention from what he considered important topics to merely popular ones. But in any given week, cable ratings show, about 20 percent of households tune in to the network. An early adopter when it comes to technology and distribution, C-SPAN has a remarkably robust, user-friendly, and free website that allows visitors to search through video clips and transcripts of 240,000 hours of archives. Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings are there, along with Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race, Rand Paul’s epic 13-hour anti-surveillance filibuster from 2013, and dozens of appearances by Reason staff over the years.

If the typical cable news impresario is brash, arrogant, overbearing, and incapable of thinking in chunks of time longer than a few minutes, Lamb is the opposite. He speaks quietly and self-effacingly, and he prefers expansive, substantive programming to the partisan rat-a-tat-tat that defines contemporary cable news.

Born in 1941, Lamb joined the Navy in the early 1960s and was assigned to do media relations for the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. That experience, and a frustration with the superficial nature of broadcast coverage of important political matters, ultimately gave birth to the idea for C-SPAN.

Lamb also worked at the Office of Telecommunications Policy, a federal agency that was instrumental in deregulating the satellite industry in the 1970s. Under the “Open Skies” policy, the number of domestic communications satellites increased dramatically and quickly, thus making it possible for cable systems to provide original programming on a cheap, coast-to-coast basis by pulling signals from those satellites. The rise of cable TV in the 1970s, Lamb explains, provided a way to work around ABC, CBS, and NBC. “The most important thing to me was reducing the power of the three networks so that we had more opportunities to see more sides of more issues,” he says. In the late 1970s, he pitched a group of cable executives on a network that would provide long-form coverage of politics and culture. American media would never be the same.

In March, as C-SPAN was celebrating its 40th anniversary, Lamb spoke with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie via phone about his four decades of fostering civil discourse and transparency. Later that month, he announced he would be stepping down as CEO.*

Reason: Set the scene for me. Why did you want to create C-SPAN? What need did it serve?

Lamb: I grew up in the very nice little town of Lafayette, Indiana, and I joined the Navy and went off to see the world. As I started to see the world, I realized how much was available in certain parts of the country that wasn’t available to me in Lafayette. I grew up watching the three big networks that were located in New York City. I started doing radio and television when I was in high school and college. I went to Purdue, and it seemed to me that we were getting the same message from everybody. The three networks had an enormous amount of power. I didn’t find anything bad about them—it’s just they had so much power, and there was so much more going on in the world [that they weren’t showing us].

During the Vietnam War, you worked for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson. You also worked in Richard Nixon’s White House. How did this affect your desire for government transparency?

Well, it’s a stretch to say that I worked for Robert McNamara. I was in the Pentagon, working in the Defense Office of Public Affairs. My immediate boss was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. I didn’t get close to Robert McNamara. At the same time, I was also a social aide for Lyndon Johnson, and I would be invited to come to the White House and work their social occasions. You really just did what the social secretary told you to do. I spent two years doing that in the middle of the Vietnam War.

I had worked on the 1968 Nixon campaign, and I hate to keep saying this, but it’s important just to understand how close I wasn’t. I wanted to go to work in the Nixon White House communications office, and I didn’t get the job. Eventually I went up to Capitol Hill in a little office called the Office of Telecommunications Policy [which pushed for deregulation of satellites]. Frankly, I had tried to go to work for ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they all said no. Eventually, the good news was that power was taken away from NBC, ABC, and CBS by the creation of the [cable industry]. That’s how I got involved.

Were those experiences spent on the periphery of power important to developing a sense that we should be seeing how government works?

Extremely important, but the most important thing to me was reducing the power of the three networks so that we had more opportunities to see more sides of more issues. People in the cable [industry] were willing to take a chance with us because they knew that we were going to be televising the House of Representatives. They understood what that meant. And also it was going to be done in a very inexpensive way.

When cable started, it was a bunch of men—almost all men—who got into the business of cable television to serve communities that didn’t have clear pictures [from broadcast]. They were in mountainous regions and small towns, and they would deliver the channels from the big cities so that [viewers would] have some choice. It started out just that basic, because it was too expensive to be able to transmit programs all over the United States.

Then the satellites came in around 1974–75 [creating the ability of cable providers to transmit original, affordable programming all over the country]. HBO was the leader, showing movies without ads all over the United States on these cable systems. Everybody started seeing the opportunity, because you could bring in something unique. It didn’t have to be just another over-the-air television station. And so all these guys that were in that business were looking for new ideas [for cable channels], and I just came into the middle of that and said, “I have an idea.”

An ad hoc group of cable television system owners had these meetings, and they would invite people to come in and pitch them. I was just one of those guys that got 30 minutes one day out of the goodness of the fellow’s heart that ran the thing. My pitch was: Let’s do something other than movies and sports. Let’s do public affairs television, and let’s start in a limited way.

A fellow who liked the idea went back to the industry, and they said, “No, we don’t want to pay for that.” Then it was a month or two later that the idea popped up to [put a camera in] the House of Representatives, and that’s when they said, “Yeah, we like that one. We will pay for that one.”

I made it really clear to them that I had absolutely no interest in putting it together in a way that would require taxpayer money. This should be independent of all government connection, and it would be a journalistic institution, and we wouldn’t be regulated, and we could make up our own minds.

What are some of your favorite moments over the past 40 years?

I think the most significant thing was the change of leadership [in the House of Representatives]. Watching that process, from 1979 when Tip O’Neill was in charge to 1995 [when Newt Gingrich took over], was the most important thing that we’ve been able to see. The Republican Party had been out of power for 40 years.

I must say: I thought that when the American people could see how the money was spent that they would be more responsible, and it’s just been the opposite.

Is that an unintended consequence of filming lawmakers? People were like, “Now that I see that everybody else is getting money, I want mine too. Just put it on the credit card.”

I don’t know. I’ve never thought about the unintended consequences. We used to get a lot of criticism because people would say that the presence of cameras changed [the way politicians govern]. But the number of hours that they’re in session has not changed. You do see more people show up at some of these hearings—members of Congress [actually attend] instead of having just their staff sit there and tell them what happened. I think one thing is that now a lot of people around the country know what their [representatives and senators] look like.

When I first came to town, Margaret Chase Smith was the only woman in the Senate. There are now 23 women. And there are all these new members of Congress who are attractive and well-spoken and interesting and have good backgrounds, and we’ve covered them all.

C-SPAN has always been an early adopter of technological innovation. You were early streamers of content online. You supply transcripts of everything. You let people make and circulate their own clips. Where did that vision come from?

It’s all part of a group of people here who came when they were 22 and now they’re 55, and they were able to build this place out of whole cloth. Every time you see things change, you say, “We’ve got to be a part of it.” We were the first ones to stream nationally on the internet in 1995, free of charge to everybody. Nobody paid a whole lot of attention to it at the time, but now [live streaming is] the flavor of the day.

Your archives are this incredible repository of meaningful conversations that are waiting to be mined for insight and history.

Robert Browning, a professor at Purdue University working with us, created the archive. We now have 240,000 hours of [material] that anybody can see and use worldwide, free of charge. You don’t have to pay a dime to anybody. This is all a product of what cable television executives decided to do back in the late ’70s.

You have a lot of programming besides the House and the Senate. There’s Washington Journal, a call-in show with journalists, politicians, and activists; all the Book TV programs, where you do in-depth interviews with writers; coverage of events all over the country. How do you come up with those types of programs?

We started our first call-in show on October 7, 1980. I said this was an opportunity for the public to talk back to the television set. I had listened to Larry King, who started his nationwide radio call-in show in 1978. We came along and said, “Let’s do [call-ins] all the time.” There’s nothing magic about this place other than we were really given an opportunity by our board of directors to experiment. They never looked over our shoulder and said, “Do this; don’t do that.”

I remember the exact [inspiration for our book coverage]. I was really anxious to see Neil Sheehan’s book, A Bright, Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. I grew up in the Vietnam War. It was a very difficult time for our country, and I don’t think we’ve really ever recovered from it. And I wanted to find out what Neil Sheehan had found.

I also knew what was going to happen when his book came out. He’d be on the Today show for six minutes. They’d probably talk about John Paul Vann’s sex life. [Vann was an adviser to the regime in Saigon whose U.S. military career was derailed by a statutory rape charge.] I said, “This is an opportunity for us to do what [the networks] can’t do.” So I interviewed him for two and a half hours. We put Sheehan on every night for 30 minutes and then on the fifth night got him in the studio and opened the phone. We let people talk back to him. That’s how we got into books.

It’s been a magnificent evolution. The government finally got out of the way of over-regulating the cable television business. This thing blew open with the internet, so that now any human being in this country can dream about doing something in video and audio, and they don’t have to ask anybody’s permission.

You’ve been an outspoken critic of all forms of content regulation by the government. What is your philosophy in terms of media speech? 

I’ve always felt the idea of having a government employee sitting in an office at the [Federal Communications Commission] determining what’s fair or not fair is a joke. What’s fair today would not have been fair 20 years ago, and we’re better off in spite of the fact that we don’t like a lot of what we see or hear. It’s better to have the freedom to say and do what you want to do and let the marketplace make that decision.

I can’t stand the idea of regulation of content, and I can’t stand the idea that government officials, including the Supreme Court, determine what we can see and not see. It’s just the way I grew up. I’m not even sure I’m right. I’m sure a lot of people who loved the Fairness Doctrine [a defunct policy that required broadcasters to offer competing viewpoints on controversial public issues] would totally disagree with this. Back in the day, the right wing and the left wing [both] loved it, because they thought they could control the content. If it wasn’t for the [end] of the Fairness Doctrine, you couldn’t have started The Larry King Show. You had to match everybody’s comment on radio with somebody else’s comment. They wouldn’t have taken a chance.

Do you worry that we’re going through a new spasm of restriction, whether it’s the attempts to bring back net neutrality rules or the effort to limit the legal immunity of websites and internet service providers under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? 

I’m too old to worry about stuff like that. Twenty-five, 30, 40 years ago I worried about it. It is the nature of Washington, D.C., that the cycles continue. No matter what we did 30 years ago, we’re going to go back and do it again. When people get into power, they love control.

The cameras in the House and the Senate are under the control of the House and the Senate. No matter how hard we’ve tried to put our own cameras in there, they want to protect what people can see. It’s the same way with the Supreme Court [refusing to allow cameras inside]. I love the Supreme Court. I think it’s probably the best of the three branches of government. But the idea that they have hunkered down and said, “We’re not going to let you see 75 one-hour arguments a year in which no decisions are made” just drives me crazy. There’s really no excuse for it.

You’ve been trying to get cameras on the Supreme Court’s oral arguments for years. You don’t see any hope for that?

I have no hope in my lifetime that we’ll get cameras into the Supreme Court. The new, younger members come into the Court, and they [seem amenable to the idea], but about six months in, they all of a sudden say, “Well, I’ve taken a look at it, and I think it’s probably better off that we not televise proceedings.” It’s going to take somebody years from now who says, “It’s time for the rest of the country to see what we do here in that little tiny courtroom.”

You’ve mentioned that the Vietnam War was a shock to the system in many different ways, but especially when it came to the credibility of government and media. We now live in an age of “fake news” and hyperpolarization. Do you think things are better or worse or about the same when it comes to faith in media and politicians? 

I’m not smart enough to know how to answer that question. As an individual I have far more information available to me today if I want to use it. There’s really the 10 percenters in the United States that pay attention, who worry about the government and the future and all that stuff. The rest of the people just go on about their lives, and I think they’ve sadly learned to not trust their government.

[I recently interviewed] Amy Greenberg, a professor from Penn State, who did a book on the wife of James Polk, who was our president back in [the 1840s]. At one point in the interview I said, “Are you saying that James Polk lied us into the Mexican War?” She said, “Absolutely.” And it just struck me: I mean, it’s usually not quite that simple, but people have lied us into wars forever. With the situation with Vietnam, they were not able to sell us on the value of being there, but they lied us into it and lied to us during the war. It just so happened that I was in the Pentagon at the time, helping them lie. That had a big impact on me personally.

You see the polls all the time, and they’re not very reassuring. The last poll I heard [said that] only 26 percent of the American people can identify the three branches of government. And that’s disappointing when I think about the fact that we’ve been in business for 40 years. I would always think, along the way, that this might help people get to know more than they did before, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

What will the next 40 years of C-SPAN look like? 

This sounds a little bit pessimistic, but our next responsibility is to survive. The economic model is changing in front of our eyes. People are dropping cable. The kids don’t watch television. They watch their phones, and our revenue stream is entirely based on the number of homes that are connected to C-SPAN. It used to be 100 million, but it’s down to 88 million. Who’s going to own these [cable companies], and will they be civic-minded? There’s a lot more available through YouTube, websites, podcasts than we ever dreamed. We have got to continue to convince the people who pay our bills that we’re worth $70 million a year—that we still have value.

Lies About Vietnam Inspired Brian Lamb To Start C-SPAN: Podcast

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Reason Podcast.

*CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Lamb is stepping down as CEO and ending his weekly programming but will still serve as executive chairman.

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How Vietnam Gave Us C-SPAN 

On May 19, 2019, a major era in American media and politics quietly ended. Brian Lamb made his final official weekly* appearance on C-SPAN, the public affairs television network he launched 40 years ago. Fittingly, that last show was an in-depth interview with historian David McCullough, whose work often chronicles how previously underappreciated figures such as Harry Truman and John Adams radically transformed American history.

The 77-year-old Lamb could be one of McCullough’s protagonists. He didn’t just anticipate our era of transparency, in which governments, corporations, and other institutions are held accountable to an extent once unimaginable; he helped to create that era by effectively turning surveillance cameras on Congress. In 1979, C-SPAN started broadcasting live coverage of the United States House of Representatives. Long before reality TV shows such as Real World, Survivor, the Real Housewives franchise, and Sober House entered the zeitgeist, C-SPAN gave Americans direct, unmediated access to one of the most powerful groups of people on the planet. For the first time in history, we could see our elected representatives arguing, wheeling and dealing, and literally falling asleep during debates over federal budgets, foreign policy, tax plans, and much more.

In 1986, C-SPAN started covering the Senate in a similar fashion, giving us unadulterated views of confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justices, cabinet secretaries, and other high-level appointees. Other programming—ranging from live, comprehensive coverage of the Iowa caucuses to bus tours of presidential libraries and other off-the-beaten-track locales to hourslong interviews with authors, policy makers, and politicians—soon followed.

C-SPAN famously doesn’t pay attention to ratings, because Lamb has long suspected that data on audience size would subconsciously redirect attention from what he considered important topics to merely popular ones. But in any given week, cable ratings show, about 20 percent of households tune in to the network. An early adopter when it comes to technology and distribution, C-SPAN has a remarkably robust, user-friendly, and free website that allows visitors to search through video clips and transcripts of 240,000 hours of archives. Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings are there, along with Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race, Rand Paul’s epic 13-hour anti-surveillance filibuster from 2013, and dozens of appearances by Reason staff over the years.

If the typical cable news impresario is brash, arrogant, overbearing, and incapable of thinking in chunks of time longer than a few minutes, Lamb is the opposite. He speaks quietly and self-effacingly, and he prefers expansive, substantive programming to the partisan rat-a-tat-tat that defines contemporary cable news.

Born in 1941, Lamb joined the Navy in the early 1960s and was assigned to do media relations for the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. That experience, and a frustration with the superficial nature of broadcast coverage of important political matters, ultimately gave birth to the idea for C-SPAN.

Lamb also worked at the Office of Telecommunications Policy, a federal agency that was instrumental in deregulating the satellite industry in the 1970s. Under the “Open Skies” policy, the number of domestic communications satellites increased dramatically and quickly, thus making it possible for cable systems to provide original programming on a cheap, coast-to-coast basis by pulling signals from those satellites. The rise of cable TV in the 1970s, Lamb explains, provided a way to work around ABC, CBS, and NBC. “The most important thing to me was reducing the power of the three networks so that we had more opportunities to see more sides of more issues,” he says. In the late 1970s, he pitched a group of cable executives on a network that would provide long-form coverage of politics and culture. American media would never be the same.

In March, as C-SPAN was celebrating its 40th anniversary, Lamb spoke with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie via phone about his four decades of fostering civil discourse and transparency. Later that month, he announced he would be stepping down as CEO.*

Reason: Set the scene for me. Why did you want to create C-SPAN? What need did it serve?

Lamb: I grew up in the very nice little town of Lafayette, Indiana, and I joined the Navy and went off to see the world. As I started to see the world, I realized how much was available in certain parts of the country that wasn’t available to me in Lafayette. I grew up watching the three big networks that were located in New York City. I started doing radio and television when I was in high school and college. I went to Purdue, and it seemed to me that we were getting the same message from everybody. The three networks had an enormous amount of power. I didn’t find anything bad about them—it’s just they had so much power, and there was so much more going on in the world [that they weren’t showing us].

During the Vietnam War, you worked for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson. You also worked in Richard Nixon’s White House. How did this affect your desire for government transparency?

Well, it’s a stretch to say that I worked for Robert McNamara. I was in the Pentagon, working in the Defense Office of Public Affairs. My immediate boss was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. I didn’t get close to Robert McNamara. At the same time, I was also a social aide for Lyndon Johnson, and I would be invited to come to the White House and work their social occasions. You really just did what the social secretary told you to do. I spent two years doing that in the middle of the Vietnam War.

I had worked on the 1968 Nixon campaign, and I hate to keep saying this, but it’s important just to understand how close I wasn’t. I wanted to go to work in the Nixon White House communications office, and I didn’t get the job. Eventually I went up to Capitol Hill in a little office called the Office of Telecommunications Policy [which pushed for deregulation of satellites]. Frankly, I had tried to go to work for ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they all said no. Eventually, the good news was that power was taken away from NBC, ABC, and CBS by the creation of the [cable industry]. That’s how I got involved.

Were those experiences spent on the periphery of power important to developing a sense that we should be seeing how government works?

Extremely important, but the most important thing to me was reducing the power of the three networks so that we had more opportunities to see more sides of more issues. People in the cable [industry] were willing to take a chance with us because they knew that we were going to be televising the House of Representatives. They understood what that meant. And also it was going to be done in a very inexpensive way.

When cable started, it was a bunch of men—almost all men—who got into the business of cable television to serve communities that didn’t have clear pictures [from broadcast]. They were in mountainous regions and small towns, and they would deliver the channels from the big cities so that [viewers would] have some choice. It started out just that basic, because it was too expensive to be able to transmit programs all over the United States.

Then the satellites came in around 1974–75 [creating the ability of cable providers to transmit original, affordable programming all over the country]. HBO was the leader, showing movies without ads all over the United States on these cable systems. Everybody started seeing the opportunity, because you could bring in something unique. It didn’t have to be just another over-the-air television station. And so all these guys that were in that business were looking for new ideas [for cable channels], and I just came into the middle of that and said, “I have an idea.”

An ad hoc group of cable television system owners had these meetings, and they would invite people to come in and pitch them. I was just one of those guys that got 30 minutes one day out of the goodness of the fellow’s heart that ran the thing. My pitch was: Let’s do something other than movies and sports. Let’s do public affairs television, and let’s start in a limited way.

A fellow who liked the idea went back to the industry, and they said, “No, we don’t want to pay for that.” Then it was a month or two later that the idea popped up to [put a camera in] the House of Representatives, and that’s when they said, “Yeah, we like that one. We will pay for that one.”

I made it really clear to them that I had absolutely no interest in putting it together in a way that would require taxpayer money. This should be independent of all government connection, and it would be a journalistic institution, and we wouldn’t be regulated, and we could make up our own minds.

What are some of your favorite moments over the past 40 years?

I think the most significant thing was the change of leadership [in the House of Representatives]. Watching that process, from 1979 when Tip O’Neill was in charge to 1995 [when Newt Gingrich took over], was the most important thing that we’ve been able to see. The Republican Party had been out of power for 40 years.

I must say: I thought that when the American people could see how the money was spent that they would be more responsible, and it’s just been the opposite.

Is that an unintended consequence of filming lawmakers? People were like, “Now that I see that everybody else is getting money, I want mine too. Just put it on the credit card.”

I don’t know. I’ve never thought about the unintended consequences. We used to get a lot of criticism because people would say that the presence of cameras changed [the way politicians govern]. But the number of hours that they’re in session has not changed. You do see more people show up at some of these hearings—members of Congress [actually attend] instead of having just their staff sit there and tell them what happened. I think one thing is that now a lot of people around the country know what their [representatives and senators] look like.

When I first came to town, Margaret Chase Smith was the only woman in the Senate. There are now 23 women. And there are all these new members of Congress who are attractive and well-spoken and interesting and have good backgrounds, and we’ve covered them all.

C-SPAN has always been an early adopter of technological innovation. You were early streamers of content online. You supply transcripts of everything. You let people make and circulate their own clips. Where did that vision come from?

It’s all part of a group of people here who came when they were 22 and now they’re 55, and they were able to build this place out of whole cloth. Every time you see things change, you say, “We’ve got to be a part of it.” We were the first ones to stream nationally on the internet in 1995, free of charge to everybody. Nobody paid a whole lot of attention to it at the time, but now [live streaming is] the flavor of the day.

Your archives are this incredible repository of meaningful conversations that are waiting to be mined for insight and history.

Robert Browning, a professor at Purdue University working with us, created the archive. We now have 240,000 hours of [material] that anybody can see and use worldwide, free of charge. You don’t have to pay a dime to anybody. This is all a product of what cable television executives decided to do back in the late ’70s.

You have a lot of programming besides the House and the Senate. There’s Washington Journal, a call-in show with journalists, politicians, and activists; all the Book TV programs, where you do in-depth interviews with writers; coverage of events all over the country. How do you come up with those types of programs?

We started our first call-in show on October 7, 1980. I said this was an opportunity for the public to talk back to the television set. I had listened to Larry King, who started his nationwide radio call-in show in 1978. We came along and said, “Let’s do [call-ins] all the time.” There’s nothing magic about this place other than we were really given an opportunity by our board of directors to experiment. They never looked over our shoulder and said, “Do this; don’t do that.”

I remember the exact [inspiration for our book coverage]. I was really anxious to see Neil Sheehan’s book, A Bright, Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. I grew up in the Vietnam War. It was a very difficult time for our country, and I don’t think we’ve really ever recovered from it. And I wanted to find out what Neil Sheehan had found.

I also knew what was going to happen when his book came out. He’d be on the Today show for six minutes. They’d probably talk about John Paul Vann’s sex life. [Vann was an adviser to the regime in Saigon whose U.S. military career was derailed by a statutory rape charge.] I said, “This is an opportunity for us to do what [the networks] can’t do.” So I interviewed him for two and a half hours. We put Sheehan on every night for 30 minutes and then on the fifth night got him in the studio and opened the phone. We let people talk back to him. That’s how we got into books.

It’s been a magnificent evolution. The government finally got out of the way of over-regulating the cable television business. This thing blew open with the internet, so that now any human being in this country can dream about doing something in video and audio, and they don’t have to ask anybody’s permission.

You’ve been an outspoken critic of all forms of content regulation by the government. What is your philosophy in terms of media speech? 

I’ve always felt the idea of having a government employee sitting in an office at the [Federal Communications Commission] determining what’s fair or not fair is a joke. What’s fair today would not have been fair 20 years ago, and we’re better off in spite of the fact that we don’t like a lot of what we see or hear. It’s better to have the freedom to say and do what you want to do and let the marketplace make that decision.

I can’t stand the idea of regulation of content, and I can’t stand the idea that government officials, including the Supreme Court, determine what we can see and not see. It’s just the way I grew up. I’m not even sure I’m right. I’m sure a lot of people who loved the Fairness Doctrine [a defunct policy that required broadcasters to offer competing viewpoints on controversial public issues] would totally disagree with this. Back in the day, the right wing and the left wing [both] loved it, because they thought they could control the content. If it wasn’t for the [end] of the Fairness Doctrine, you couldn’t have started The Larry King Show. You had to match everybody’s comment on radio with somebody else’s comment. They wouldn’t have taken a chance.

Do you worry that we’re going through a new spasm of restriction, whether it’s the attempts to bring back net neutrality rules or the effort to limit the legal immunity of websites and internet service providers under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? 

I’m too old to worry about stuff like that. Twenty-five, 30, 40 years ago I worried about it. It is the nature of Washington, D.C., that the cycles continue. No matter what we did 30 years ago, we’re going to go back and do it again. When people get into power, they love control.

The cameras in the House and the Senate are under the control of the House and the Senate. No matter how hard we’ve tried to put our own cameras in there, they want to protect what people can see. It’s the same way with the Supreme Court [refusing to allow cameras inside]. I love the Supreme Court. I think it’s probably the best of the three branches of government. But the idea that they have hunkered down and said, “We’re not going to let you see 75 one-hour arguments a year in which no decisions are made” just drives me crazy. There’s really no excuse for it.

You’ve been trying to get cameras on the Supreme Court’s oral arguments for years. You don’t see any hope for that?

I have no hope in my lifetime that we’ll get cameras into the Supreme Court. The new, younger members come into the Court, and they [seem amenable to the idea], but about six months in, they all of a sudden say, “Well, I’ve taken a look at it, and I think it’s probably better off that we not televise proceedings.” It’s going to take somebody years from now who says, “It’s time for the rest of the country to see what we do here in that little tiny courtroom.”

You’ve mentioned that the Vietnam War was a shock to the system in many different ways, but especially when it came to the credibility of government and media. We now live in an age of “fake news” and hyperpolarization. Do you think things are better or worse or about the same when it comes to faith in media and politicians? 

I’m not smart enough to know how to answer that question. As an individual I have far more information available to me today if I want to use it. There’s really the 10 percenters in the United States that pay attention, who worry about the government and the future and all that stuff. The rest of the people just go on about their lives, and I think they’ve sadly learned to not trust their government.

[I recently interviewed] Amy Greenberg, a professor from Penn State, who did a book on the wife of James Polk, who was our president back in [the 1840s]. At one point in the interview I said, “Are you saying that James Polk lied us into the Mexican War?” She said, “Absolutely.” And it just struck me: I mean, it’s usually not quite that simple, but people have lied us into wars forever. With the situation with Vietnam, they were not able to sell us on the value of being there, but they lied us into it and lied to us during the war. It just so happened that I was in the Pentagon at the time, helping them lie. That had a big impact on me personally.

You see the polls all the time, and they’re not very reassuring. The last poll I heard [said that] only 26 percent of the American people can identify the three branches of government. And that’s disappointing when I think about the fact that we’ve been in business for 40 years. I would always think, along the way, that this might help people get to know more than they did before, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

What will the next 40 years of C-SPAN look like? 

This sounds a little bit pessimistic, but our next responsibility is to survive. The economic model is changing in front of our eyes. People are dropping cable. The kids don’t watch television. They watch their phones, and our revenue stream is entirely based on the number of homes that are connected to C-SPAN. It used to be 100 million, but it’s down to 88 million. Who’s going to own these [cable companies], and will they be civic-minded? There’s a lot more available through YouTube, websites, podcasts than we ever dreamed. We have got to continue to convince the people who pay our bills that we’re worth $70 million a year—that we still have value.

Lies About Vietnam Inspired Brian Lamb To Start C-SPAN: Podcast

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. You can listen to the full conversation, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Reason Podcast.

*CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Lamb is stepping down as CEO and ending his weekly programming but will still serve as executive chairman.

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