Where is C-SPAN3? Who actually gets it? No rural access.

As mentioned at the start, this blog is here because of Bush's "troop augmentation plan."

When that news built and then broke, I started looking for coverage of hearings during the week of January 11 2007. I found there was a slew of scheduled coverage on the obscure C-SPAN3 channel (cspan.org). For you who are not policy wonks or middle aged or have real day jobs, C-SPAN is how you can see your government in action. And you get the full coverage, commercial free, blemishes and all, not just the sound bites on the evening 1-minute news coverage. C-SPAN started with one channel that was carried gratis on cable networks as a public access project. They added C-SPAN2, and lately seem to have a loose convention of airing House of Representatives business on C-SPAN and Senate business on C-SPAN2. Then came a third channel C-SPAN3, which I notice is not carried, well, anywhere. A companion web site capitolhearings.org posts some hearing schedules, but I think not all hearings appear here.

OK. You can get some live webcasts. Darn it I have to install Real Player and open my firewall to its promiscuous and frequent upgrade proposals. But who out there has CSPAN3, either on their cable or dish access? I have Comcast cable in the pacific northwest, and cannot get it. They simply have not added it to their line-up (but new shopping/special commercial interest channels have been added often. Buy! Shop!). A family member in the plains states has DirecTV and they don't have it on that dish line-up. I can recall staying in a hotel in NY and I think I saw it there for the first time (perhaps that's Time Warner cable). So why the blackout of C-SPAN3?

What''s the beef? Why me worry? C-SPAN3 seems to be where the "real juicy" stuff of government has been aired, live, in recent weeks, in particular the House and Senate committee hearings. Since the Republican Congress seems to have been a sleeping lap dog the last 6 years, it seems fitting that since the tide turned Democratic in the House and Senate the new season of Congress is seeing a renewal of oversight, and this is interesting to watch. (OK, there's my political leanings. Satisfied?)

While the Senate and House are in session, the first two C-SPAN channels pretty much dedicate all their air time to live coverage. The only place to see the hearings live is C-SPAN3. Late at night, or after the Senate and House adjourn, other coverage can start, including the book, call-in shows, and a re-play of interesting committee hearings. But the air times for these items don't get posted to the schedule until after the Congressional bodies adjourn, so there is no fixed schedule. It's as if, during the Watergate hearings, there was a live broadcast on a mystery channel that no-one could watch, with random replays late at night on the accessible channel. The priorities are back-asswards, as I find that most live Senate/House coverage is pretty dull.

Comcast has a spot on their website to "request" channels. I did so last summer, again this month. I plan to request monthly, weekly, maybe start writing a letter. Maybe CC the letter to the FCC? But on the C-SPAN website, there is a note that there is a multi-way spat between the FCC and for-profit broadcasters and the cable and dish industry about "access." A polite way of saying they are fighting over allocation of channels and available bandwidth. These fights do not seem to stop Comcast from adding a gazillion for-profit channels that air paid advertising. But to add one more non-advertising channel seems to be more than they want to deliver.

Broadband webcasts? Sure. Except that in a lot of the rural areas, you can't get broadband. Sounds like an equal access issue to me. My family in the plains cannot get DSL, even 300-baud dial-up, because the driveway to the house is 3/4 mile, and phone line quality is poor. Back in the stone-age when I used dial-up at my Northwest suburban home, I could not get my laptop dial-up to work out there, even at 300 baud. DSL is not available there today. Cell phone reception is sketchy. Cable: forget it, they will never run cable to these areas. Satelite internet: yeah right, for a thousand dollars in equipment and $50 to $100 monthly, no.

I could hope that some day Wi-Max will get built out along the state highway and rural towns and provide broadband coverage. Or, that fiber optic will get built out to the rural areas: but the big telco's like Verizon and Sprint sold off their rural wireline subsidiaries long ago: low subscriber base per square mile, low margin business, customers not wanting to pay for the triple-play package.