Lamb: We probably take more than that now.
Reason: How have you been surprised by the callers?
Lamb: I've been surprised at the extraordinary breadth of intelligence in the country, people who know on every issue, more than the experts who live and work here. [Callers] who are experts on history, who have had first-hand experience in an industry in the middle of a debate can call up and say, "I don't know what you're doing out there, but I've worked as an airplane pilot for the last 25 years, and you've just got it wrong."
We've also learned that the people who call the call-in shows are very aggressive people who have strong views and often strong negative views about everything. They're angry, so they go to the phone, they pick it up and say, "I'm going to have my say-so." And that's fine.
You know there's a lot of anxiety among media folks in this country about the anger in the call-in shows. Well, there are people in this country who are angry, so let them talk. You know, the more they talk the better off it is. Let it rip, let people say what they want to say.
You have viewers who watch all day. But that's a minor percentage. Then you have viewers who watch one hour a week. But this is a country where 70 percent of the people find what they want to watch by using a remote-control device. That's the way they find C-SPAN.
Guests will often say after they've appeared here, "I've never gotten as much feedback from any program that I ever appeared on." There's a very simple Reason: When they appear here, we run [the show] three or four times, in different time zones, at different times. So the chances of people finding a face that they recognize and that they want to hear from is much greater here than it is in any other place in television.
The Today show comes on from 7 to 9 in the morning and that's the last time you see it. If you'd get a sound bite on CNN it might run 12 times during the day and somebody would say, "Oh, I saw your sound bite." Here, they'll see your whole discussion.
This is the only place in the history of electronic communications where someone can approach a microphone with a speech, stand in front of the microphone, and complete their thoughts without any interference, whether it's an elected representative in the House of Representatives or the United States Senate, or whether it's somebody who's at the National Press Club.
I was watching Richard Leakey on this network this morning talking about Kenya and he could say everything he wanted to say within that hour and no one was going to interfere with him. That's a dynamic here that very few people understand, and that is the biggest change that we have contributed to communications--that there are thousands of people who have stepped in front of a microphone over the last 16 years who have been able to say everything they've wanted to say.
Reason: How do you select the journalists, how do you select the symposia, how do you select the books?
Lamb: The same way any other editorial group selects anything. And the luxury that we have here [is that we can ask], "All right, did we have the other side on a week ago, and do we need to put this side on now?" Decisions aren't reached that way in other places. Their drive is rating points. That's their success mark, the sales and the advertising. We are able to sit back and say, "Did we have the lobbyist on today, and did we get the anti-lobbyist position on?" That's a great luxury, and that's what drives us all.
Reason: Has providing an unfiltered message caused Congress to change at all?
Lamb: It's hard for me to know, because there's so much change in the media at large. I think the biggest change hasn't been what we've done--the biggest change is the multiplicity of choice. And added to that is that 85 percent of the American people have a VCR, 15 percent [subscribe to] an on-line service, and radio's been deregulated. So you have this tremendous choice out there of radio stations to listen to. You've got video games. People no longer get up in the morning and say, "What is the Today show doing for me today?" They get up and they really, literally have choice.
In an interview that was on this network a couple of years ago, George Will talked about how he gets up every morning and plops an audio book into his tape recorder and listens to that. We now can control our lives. If you're controlled by the media world, well, then it's your fault and you can't blame the media.
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