C-Span Posts Full Archives Online 115
An anonymous reader sends word that C-Span has completed its project of making all of its footage available online. "The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday. Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is like being able to Google political history using the "I Feel Lucky" button every time,' said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host."
Re:If you can find anything (Score:3, Interesting)
If only 22,776 people sit down and review 10 hours of video each, we can have the entire 26-year span (assuming 24/7 of that 26-year span has video to bother with) done in 10 hours.
It's not as bad as you think.
Re:If you can find anythingWikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Goody! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm totally going to watch the Iran Contra hearings. Inouwe chewing out North FTW.
Re:Time to add the Lie detector to the Ticker line (Score:3, Interesting)
Time to add the Lie detector to the Ticker line...Every time someone lies on Cspan. whoop whoop whoop!
Reminds me of a federal election debate here in .au when the TV network gave each studio audience member a control box so they could indicate "like" or "don't like" for what they were hearing. The composite output was a line on the screen which quickly became called "the worm".
Politicians hated it of course.
Re:Not for Long (Score:5, Interesting)
That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
I sometimes listen to House/Senate debates on C-Span in the car and when you compare news articles to the actual debate, it's amazing how much nuance journalists throw away.
Our Representatives usually have a very good grasp of the issues, but this fact is rarely carried through into the reporting which follows.
Re:Not for Long (Score:4, Interesting)
That irony, of course, is layered with another irony, that while most of those groups repeatedly make claims of media bias, few would consider watching C-SPAN. Boring? You betcha. Most of life's issues are mind-numbingly dull in their complexity, especially when presented unedited and unfiltered.
Not to mention that much of what Congress does is mind-numbingly stupid in its procedural complexity and various random tactics that are commonly used all the time to slow down what's going on even further (and thus make it even more boring).
Back when I was in high school, I'd sometimes turn on C-SPAN when I came home after school after a hard day and needed a nap. It provided useful "white noise."
What I quickly learned was that aside from days when debates were happening on major issues, most of C-SPAN when Congress was in session consisted of Congressmen speaking on obscure resolutions like honoring some random person, or (better yet) delay tactics like quorum calls, invoking procedural idiocies that bog down debate in parliamentary matters, etc.
It's ironic that the service that brought Congress to the public on video resulted in Congressmen themselves hanging out in their offices rather than the chamber, thus creating not only the news soundbite (nobody's usually there listening anyway, so everybody's trying to score a place on the evening news on camera), but also the creation of novel ways of slowing down business. I can remember entire afternoons consisting of quorum calls, where everyone would file into the chamber for attendance purposes that would waste a half hour, file out, and then someone else would "note the absence of a quorum," and the whole process would start all over again.
Your tax dollars at work....