As useful as a site of this kind can possibly be, Speaker Pelosi’s blog ‘The Gavel‘ (which I have linked to under ‘Politics’) utilizes YouTube a great deal by posting clips of CSPAN in a very short amount of time, and is organized brilliantly. I was viewing clips of the hearing on GSA oversight without realizing I was actually on a government site, and upon finding out that it was run by Pelosi, it dawned on me that a new day has truly arrived.
I love downloading the news clips from Crooks and Liars, but to be honest, I consider the clips from Meet the Press, FoxNews, MSNBC, etc to be irrelevant compared with the content produced by CSPAN. I can’t stress this enough. Cable news only enters my head through the downloading of these clips, and a big complaint of mine for quite a while now has been that there was virtually no way of getting to the actual footage of Congress besides watching it on television (House and Senate floor activity supersede committee hearings, which makes it necessary to get updates on proceedings through news outlets) or reviewing the entire event through RealPlayer using streaming video feeds provided by CSPAN once the proceedings are finally posted.
By cutting up 5-15 minute clips of committee proceedings as is done on The Gavel, one can become truly informed in a short amount of time, and without the influence of entertainers tainting the facts before they’re allowed entry into your brain. I hope that this is merely a starting point, and by the end of this decade, everything that happens within the Legislative Branch can be broken out and presented in such a way. I also hope that in the next couple of years, our government can negotiate with cable operators to expand the number of CSPAN channels available, so that debate on the floors of the House and Senate do not have to be the only available options for viewers. Clearly, a handful of channels in the 100s or 200s are necessary for concerned citizens to gain access to live feeds from committee hearings.
I will write letters to Congress on this, and using Speaker Pelosi’s blog as a reference, encourage leaders to start thinking about how this testament to open government can be expanded on the net and through cable television.