WASHINGTON — In his 22 years on television in this mecca of self-promotion, Brian Lamb has not once uttered his own name.
In his hourlong interview show "Booknotes" each week, Lamb appears on camera for about four minutes. His guest gets the other 56.
And when Capitol Hill's gossipy social season rolls around, Lamb is not among the congressmen, Cabinet secretaries and celebrity journalists who gather to drop names and rub elbows.
If you're wondering how anyone could possibly run a TV network this way in an environment so conducive to bluster over substance, then you just don't understand Lamb or C-SPAN, the cable network he founded in 1979.
You'd hardly be alone in your ignorance. At certain hours of certain days, when C-SPAN cameras lock onto members of Congress droning about bureaucrats and trade quotas, Lamb's troika of channels--C-SPANS 1 and 2, plus the new C-SPAN 3--may rank among the most unwatched in America.
Even when things get more interesting, you're liable to find a talking head on all three screens--someone either making a speech, joining a discussion or answering questions, all presented in the TV equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. No fancy graphics or catchy logos. No whooshing sound effects or blaring trumpets. No chatty panel of Sam, Cokie and George to tell us what we've just seen.
This kind of television tends to be an acquired taste. But the estimated 28 million viewers who've developed an appetite should know that Lamb, 59, is the main reason C-SPAN looks and sounds the way it does.
"He's the tone-setter," says John Splaine, a University of Maryland professor who gets paid to help keep C-SPAN as objective as possible. "He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he wanted to be fair and accurate."
As tone-setters go, Lamb offers a subdued monotone. He has been called the Jack Webb of journalism, a just-the-facts straight man in an opinionated crowd of ambushers and noisemakers. On screen, his persona is as flat and colorless as his home state of Indiana, although around the office he's more like a collegial headmaster, chatty and amiable, yet demanding objectivity from co-workers even when they talk politics by the water cooler.
Lamb started C-SPAN when he was a Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine in the late 1970s. He didn't much like what he saw on the three major networks or the way they were monopolizing nationwide news delivery, capturing about 65% of the viewing public with their nightly reports.
