‘How is Your Son?’
I don’t know about you, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, C-Span’s Booknotes program was required viewing for me on Sunday nights in those pre-World Wide Web, pre-browsing at Amazon.com, pre-Blogospheric days. This 1999 article by David Brooks* in the Weekly Standard helps to explain why, in the wake of Brian Lamb’s recent retirement announcement:
The quintessential C-SPAN moment came during a Booknotes program in 1991, while host Brian Lamb was interviewing Martin Gilbert, the author of a biography of Winston Churchill. Gilbert was talking about the interplay between private scandal and public life when the following exchange took place:
GILBERT: When Churchill was 20 and a young soldier, he was accused of buggery, and, you know, that’s, you know, a terrible accusation. Well, he ended up prime minister for just quite a long time.
LAMB: Why was he accused of buggery and what is it?
GILBERT: You don’t know what buggery is?
LAMB: Define it, please.
GILBERT: Oh dear. Well, I — I’m sorry. I thought the word we — buggery is what used to be called a — the — an unnatural act of the Oscar Wilde type is how it was actually phrased in the euphemism of the British papers. It’s — you don’t know what buggery is?
Over the twenty years that C-SPAN has been in existence, its founder Brian Lamb and his colleagues have pioneered a distinct interviewing style. The questions are flat, short, and direct. And they are centered around facts. The guests might be longwinded or erudite or both, but usually what sets them off is some six-word question about a specific fact. You get the impression that if Brian Lamb were called in to interview Jesus the first questions out of his mouth would be: “It’s said you fed the multitudes with loaves and fish. What kind of fish was that? How many people does it take to make up a multitude?”
It seems like such an easy thing to ask direct questions about simple facts. But when you zap up and down the TV dial, you notice that few of the other talk shows do it. The broadcast network interviewers ask mostly about emotions and feelings. On many of the cable talk shows, the host is the star so the questions are really rococo essays that render the answers superfluous. And when you cast your eye out to the broader culture, you see even more that curiosity about simple facts has been submerged amidst the more sophisticated interest in theory and perceptions.
Found via Orrin Judd, who actually described an even better “quintessential C-SPAN moment” — or at least quintessential Brian Lamb moment — back in 2000, when he reviewed then-Democrat presidential nominee Al Gore’s sci-fi classic, Earth in the Balance:
Has Al Gore, or any of his fellow travelers, even stopped to consider whether there has ever been a human society that was able to maintain a growing and vibrant economy during a period of declining population? I do not mean to suggest that population growth is necessary to economic growth, but I would like to hear some examples that demonstrate that it is not or even just some philosophical argument about why it is not. Or consider his call for government to dictate the development of new technologies–does anyone seriously think that some cadre of World Government bureaucrats would be competent to pick and choose what technologies are most likely to succeed, never mind the likelihood that such a system would simply be riddled with corruption. If the Twentieth Century proved anything it is that government is the enemy of human progress, perhaps even the enemy of mankind. But here is a prospective President of the United States who believes that government should be massively expanded and given an enormous range of powers over our lives. I find that pretty disturbing.
The most interesting aspect of all of this though remains the fact that baby boomer Gore apparently arrived at this radical totalitarian position as a result of his mid-life crisis. When you tell folks that your favorite TV program is Booknotes, you often receive somewhat disconcerted glances in return. But there is a certain naive genius to Brian Lamb’s interrogatory technique. Consider this exchange:
GORE: I went through a change in my life when my son was almost killed a couple of years ago. It was a shattering experience for my family. He has had a miraculous recovery and we’re very blessed and very grateful to all the doctors and the nurses who — who — who helped to make it possible. But during the long weeks when my wife and I were in the hospital room with him, I began to really look at life a little bit differently and ask questions about what’s most important in life and, having already long since been deeply involved in this issue, I began to look at it differently also.
Instead of seeing it just as an outgrowth of the new scientific and technological salt on the Earth and the population explosion which is adding one China’s worth of people every 10 years now, I began to feel that the deeper causes are within our own lives as individuals. What gives us the notion that we are just isolated one from another with no responsibility to the future our children are going to live, no connection to the communities in — in which we live out our lives. And I began to explore, in a very personal way, what it is that leads to these false assumptions and how we can get on with the task of solving thi — this crisis and organizing a response that gives our children and grandchildren and generations to come an Earth that is not diminished and degraded by virtue of what we’re doing in our short lifetimes.
LAMB: How is your son?
That is simply brilliant. This middle aged hack pol goes prattling on about how a sudden realization of human mortality forced him to reexamine his entire world view and deadpan Brian cuts to the quick to find out how the kid is. The answer, thankfully, is that the Gores’ son is fine, which only makes their extravagant reaction to the accident even more frightening. Suppose, God forbid, that Gore becomes President and something like this happens; you have to question whether a person who undergoes such a seachange in their personal philosophy at a moment of admitted stress but surely not of catastrophe is even fit to govern.
* Incidentally, whatever happened to that version of David Brooks? He seemed like a fine conservative writer before believing he could determine that a man was fit for the highest office in the land based on the cut of his trousers.
Brian Lamb wouldn’t have lasted six months at The New York Times as it is today, and neither would the 20th Century version of David Brooks.
The Times back in its heyday was never considered a “writer’s paper” like the New York Herald Tribune that could produce a Tom Wolfe or a Jimmy Breslin, because the Times’ editors through the Abe Rosenthal years sought to eliminate any attempts to be stylish in their news columns. Like Lamb’s C-SPAN interviews, that could make for some seemingly dull, Jack Webb-style prose, but it also meant some of the worst excesses of their even-then mostly liberal reporting staff were kept out of the news hole, even if op-ed remained reliably liberal.
The big question for C-SPAN is: Where does it go post-Brian Lamb? In the news media, that which doesn’t make an overt effort to be conservative eventually becomes liberal, and while Lamb’s C-SPAN is non-partisan, there’s no assurance that what comes after won’t be coaxed to the left unless the people running it are on the lookout for any attempted drift, mainly via the subjects selected to be on its shows and the events in the Washington area chosen for coverage.
The perfect, pertinent question.
Lamb is a great interviewer. His craft is fine-tuned.
As John wonders in his comment above, whether C-SPAN can maintain its level of quality remains to be seen. The lights come on and people talk without interruption, simple enough — but if the host gets all PBS-y and injects lefty talking points into nearly every question you might as well be watching, well, PBS…or CNN, or even listening to pompous NPR.
The few times I watched Lamb he drove me slightly crazy. I never knew if he was actually sort of dense or just acted that way to get information out of the person he was interviewing. Like the Churchill question above.
This is the second thing I’ve read about Lamb this week and still can’t decide whether he is brilliant or a moron.
C-Span isn’t a Canadian thing, so I guess ya had to be there.
I loved Brian Linehan but can see why he could drive others bonkers (and inspired Martin Short to parody him.)
I think in toto, the guy was (is!) brilliant. Besides its erudite tone, one of the reasons why I loved Booknotes is that Lamb got out the way and let the author do the talking, unlike Larry King, O’Reilly, et al. And that was just one show on his network.
“It’s said you fed the multitudes with loaves and fish…?”
The point is well taken, except Mr. Lamb never would have asked that question of Jesus, because Jesus wasn’t the author of the Bible.
Actually, most Christians believe
(1) the Bible is the word of G-d
(2) and thus was/is written by G-d
(3) Jesus is part of the Holy Trinity
(4) Jesus is one with G-d
so yes, Jesus did write the Bible.
Amen.
Old Testament, too?
That was priceless….
Brian Lamb is probably the best journalist in the business. He sticks to the facts, steers guests away from talking points, lets the air out of gasbags, always gets to the heart of the issue, is unfailingly polite and respectful, and is scrupulously neutral. And he actually reads the damn book before he interviews the author (and reads the author’s wikipedia page…not just the press release from the agent). I wish we had more like him.
As my lady friend pointed out, David Brooks is the kind of conservative that liberals like to invite to their cocktail parties.
“What gives us the notion that we are just isolated one from another with no responsibility to the future our children are going to live, no connection to the communities in — in which we live out our lives.”
As I am presently re-reading Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”, I have to point out that that statement reveals a totally fascist mindset.
I sat through some interviews in the CSpan studio watching Lamb interview. He was awesome. He has resigned or is getting ready to resign. Cspan news reported it.
Oh how I miss Booknotes. It would drive my wife crazy that I had to watch it, but listening to Brian Lamb talk to an author for a solid uninterrupted hour was priceless. Yes, he asked the simple questions. I always believed that that was mostly because he didn’t want to assume that the audience knew everything. These books could be about ANYTHING in the public policy realm so it would be a huge mistake to think that the audience always knew the references. If an author made an obscure reference, Brian would just tell them to explain it please… without saying something like “of course we both know what that means, but explain it for the great unwashed masses”. Oh… and he read every single book before the interview.
Brian Lamb is fantastic — a great interviewer, taking care not to indicate his own views about the subject/author. In some interviews he has to ask many questions to get the author to open-up and talk about the book; in others very
few, as the author doesn’t hold back, while remaining on topic. One such interview stands out, it is with Norman Podhoretz on his book “Ex-Friends, …”
As I recall Brian Lamb had only to ask some six-eight questions during the interview.
http://www.booktv.org/Program/2528/ExFriends+Falling+Out+with+Allen+Ginsberg+Lionel+Diana+Trilling+Lillian+Hellman+Hannah+Arendt+Norman+Mailer.aspx
One rarely, if ever, sees Brian Lamb betraying any emotion in reaction during an interview. A non-booknotes (Q & A) interview with Peter Wallison (AEI) was the closest to such a reaction, I recall seeing. The interview was about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and their thuggish behavior. In that interview there were, to me, small indications in Brian Lamb voice in reaction to what he was hearing.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/281010-1
Re: Brooks
Some people get wiser with age. Some do not.
The first time I saw Brian Lamb I thought “Who is this nebish?” Wrong,wrong,wrong. He would ask “stupid” questions to clarify things for his audience.
I remember him asking Michael Moore, to paraphrase, “Why do you use words like.. bleep,bleep bleep in your book? What does that add?”
Moore was tongue-tied “uh,uh,uh”. I never thought I would see that vile sh*t so humiliated. The one punch knockout.
The perfect interviewer since it wasn’t about him, but about the author.If the author was a jerk it would usually come out.
Another question. How many interviewers read the book they are interviewing about? Was Lamb the only one who always did? One of a kind.
Let’s hope it’s a long, long time but also let’s be honest. A time will come when we all will be speaking in similar reverent tones about Ed Driscoll.
Thanks, Ed.
Brian Lamb is the last of the Grown Ups. Those men and women for whom absolute integrity was their lodestar. Who knew the necessity of the appearance of objectivity as well as objectivity itself. Who were mortified at the weakness and self-indulgence of moderators or interviewers spewing opinions, putting their fingers on the scales or fixing the game so that the home team won. Lamb is the antithesis of the vast majority of “journalists” today who shamelessly plump for their side.
We’re going to miss him more than we know.
Brian Lamb will not be severing all ties with C-span. The announcement of his stepping down as C-span CEO “said” that he will continue his Q&A interviews.
Brian Lamb will not be severing all ties with C-span. The announcement of his stepping down as C-span CEO reported that he will continue the Q&A interviews.
C-Span is one of the few truly fair unbiased networks. Generally they give both the left, and the right, and even more so the libertarians (who often get screwed by both the MSM and Fox), a fair say to get their views out. I definitely hope they can stay that way.