Watching old footage of C-SPAN is like seeing "how history unfolded with none of the glaze applied by cable television"

The Outline

There's a time-capsule quality to old C-SPAN videos, says Noah Kulwin. "In the last few months, in the process of making a podcast, I ended up watching hours and hours of C-SPAN programming," says Kulwin. "Though searching on the C-SPAN website is a little tricky, its immense and far-reaching catalog captivated me. What I found was a kind of counter-narrative of the last 20 years, a version of how history unfolded with none of the glaze applied by cable television. And what I learned was that the recent history was far more cringe than we’ve been led to believe." Kulwin adds: "C-SPAN isn’t and wasn’t immune from manipulation, and its greatest shortcomings are in its core functions. Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who has never met a camera he didn’t like, figured out soon after its launch that he could get a lot of mileage out of delivering fiery speeches to an empty room, given that C-SPAN didn’t use particularly wide camera angles."