Last Thursday, Jon Kelley, an assignment-desk manager at C-SPAN, was in his office in Washington, D.C., watching cable news cover the opening of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. A correspondent for one of the networks was providing updates on the latest developments over a live video feed of the Senate chamber, which showed Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, reading the articles of impeachment. The correspondent wondered aloud why the camera didn’t pan elsewhere. Wouldn’t it be nice to see what the swing-voting Republican senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins were doing as they sat next to each other? Why wasn’t the C-SPAN cameraperson trying to film that, too?
Kelley sighed. The video feed wasn’t controlled by C-SPAN; it was controlled by the Senate Recording Studio, as is always the case when the network covers floor proceedings in the Senate. (C-SPAN brought its own cameras into the Senate chamber once, for a documentary.) The network had hoped to get its cameras into the chamber for the trial, given the proceeding’s historic importance; in December, the network’s co-C.E.O. Susan Swain wrote a letter to the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, making this request, noting that the government’s existing camera setup “provides a restricted view of Senate floor debates.” The chair of the cable-network pool, which coördinates the efforts of CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, and NBC, later sent a letter in support of the request. As of Tuesday, McConnell had not replied to either letter. “People don’t realize those aren’t our cameras,” Kelley told me, on the phone from his office. “And they should be.”
The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network was created a little more than forty years ago, when the D.C. bureau chief for the trade magazine Cablevision got seed money to launch a nonprofit channel that gave Americans a more comprehensive picture of politics and government than the for-profit channels were providing. The network has since built up an unrivalled archive of political video, totalling more than a quarter million hours. In 1999, for instance, C-SPAN captured Lindsey Graham, who was then a congressman representing South Carolina’s Third District, arguing in favor of allowing witnesses to testify in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, and insisting on a broad interpretation of the phrase “high crimes.” (“It doesn’t even have to be a crime,” Graham said.)
“Impeachments aren’t our Super Bowl, exactly, or the Olympics,” Kelley told me, trying to explain what the proceedings meant for the network. “The only thing I can compare it to is every seventeen years the cicadas come out and we deal with them.” Kelley came to C-SPAN in 1997, shortly after he left college. He’s covered conventions, debates, House and Senate races; he saw George W. Bush roll fruit down the aisle of a campaign plane and, on Air Force Two, heard Al Gore quip that he invented C-SPAN. (Gore was the first person to speak on the network.) Before this year, Kelley had covered one impeachment trial. “We’ve always felt that Congress is our story to tell,” he said. “We take pride in that. For better or for worse, history is being recorded through our camera lens.”
Or the people’s camera lenses, as the case may be. The feed that C-SPAN provides of House and Senate proceedings is unmoderated and unfiltered. The network’s cameras pan and zoom, when they can, but not much. In a discussion of classic C-SPAN moments, Kelley mentioned John McCain’s vote against repealing Obamacare—a wide shot, one that caught “the conversations people were having,” Kelley noted, and “the back and forth between Lindsey Graham and Democrats and everything.” During hearings, Kelley said, “you’ll see us sometimes frame a wider shot in the room and do a slight zoom in to frame the witness table a little bit tighter. That draws people in. Then you can cut away to either a shot of the witness or to the member.” He added, “There’s a lot of ways to tell those stories through pans and zooms.” As things stand, however, C-SPAN’s crews cannot enter the chamber. As a result, he said, “you’re never going to see the Senate-controlled cameras veer away from the dais.”
Meanwhile, reporters at all networks will be dealing with new restrictions on their usual way of doing things: as the Senate sergeant at arms announced earlier this month, during the impeachment trial, electronic devices will be barred from the chamber, and reporters will not be allowed to approach senators directly outside the chamber.
The network will “air every moment” of the impeachment trial, Kelley said—on C-SPAN 2, which was created to carry live footage of the Senate when it’s in session. Kelley wished its coverage could show the body language of senators in the chamber, and give viewers an opportunity to read their lips. “Let’s not just stick to a podium,” he said. “You see so much bitterness and partisanship. Then you see people that you think just can’t stand each other having a really decent conversation.” In Kelley’s view, seeing all this would be of great service to the American public.
The network does sometimes get its own cameras into the House: the network used seven cameras to capture early House Intelligence Committee hearings on impeaching President Trump, adding both more individual angles and panoramas. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down C-SPAN’s request to use its own cameras during final debates on the articles of impeachment.
Two decades ago, Kelley was a member of a sixteen-person crew assembled to film House Judiciary hearings related to the Clinton impeachment. (C-SPAN, along with other networks, wasn’t allowed to film the Senate trial.) “At that time,” Kelley recalled, “we were able to put microphones on the dais, mix all of the microphone positions and control them ourselves. We can’t do that anymore.” The official reasons for the change were technical, but Kelley thinks that Congress also just “liked the idea” of overseeing the microphones, and what they caught. “They control them now,” he said. “We just take a feed.”
That previous impeachment trial didn’t feel quite as partisan to Kelley as this one does so far, he said. “At least they were able to come to a reasonable agreement on what was fair.” The media landscape was a lot different then—Fox News, for instance, was just a few years old. And the cable networks “certainly weren’t covering these hearings the way they are now,” Kelley said. More viewers have started watching the twenty-four-hour news networks, he noted, but, he added, “to see these hearings without commentary and from beginning to end, from gavel to gavel, we’re still the place to go.”
The impeachment trial of Trump would be, in Kelley’s estimation, “one of the two or three most significant C-SPAN events of my tenure.” As for his own opinions about it, Kelley wouldn’t say—like his network, he aspires to nonpartisanship. “Somebody said it’s a great drama TV show,” he said of impeachment. “An adventure show where the hero is getting just torn apart and he’s near death a couple of times. You think, Oh, my gosh, this might be it for him. You actually know how the story is going to end, unless something major happens.” He went on, “It’s interesting to see, if we can see it.”
