It’s Super Tuesday. The nation is sitting on the edge of its collective seat waiting to find out who will run in the upcoming Presidential election.
The act of delivering televised coverage of this near-national political events is an extraordinary challenge, but the 24 hour news networks that cover it make it look easy. We should know – we were lucky enough to see it all unfold for ourselves when we followed C-SPAN earlier in February as they covered the New Hampshire Primary.
With video crew in tow, we joined C-SPAN hoping to capture the story of how a Presidential Primary is covered by a news organization best known for un-editorialized long-form content. How, for example, does C-SPAN cover so much content over a large geographic region in such a short period of time? And what makes C-SPAN unique compared to the other large cable news networks?
We found our answer, along the way learning about the role C-SPAN has played in American journalism for the last 35 years. No other news resource in the world covers unedited government proceedings the way C-SPAN does. And no one does it without commercials, pressure from outside interest groups, or agendas. It’s entirely privately funded and, as C-SPAN Political Editor Steve Scully put it, “It’s cable’s gift to America.”
Watch the video below:
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