It has been great fun this week to have my @SalemMedia program simulcast on @CSPAN. Throughout the week (and will again today) I’ve been recognizing the work of the great Brian Lamb —who is doing the interview excerpted below— as well as the longtime hosts Peter Slen (@pslen), Susan Swain (@cspansusan), @howardmortman, and now the new CEO @SamFeistDC and of course many others that have made CSPAN the institution it is like @SteveScully, John MacArdle (@cspanJohn), @GretaBrawner, Pedro Echevarria and a dozen more behind the cameras and operations. It’s a remarkable institution among Washington’s many institutions. Russell Kirk, in Chapter 8 of The Conservative Mind, “Conservatism with Imagination: Disraeli and Newman,” gets to the heart of what makes a nation: Institutions that preserve that nation’s essence. CSPAN was born in the brain of Brian Lamb about 1977 and began broadcasting in 1979, just as America shuddered through the hostage crisis and just President Reagan campaigned for the White House. Almost 50 years later CSPAN does at least as much or more to conserve the Constitution and the liberties it protects as any organ or platform of old or new media because it allows the work of the Constitution to always be on air and it presents without filter candidates and conversations. It has done so much with Book TV and Booknotes and the broadcast of thousands of author interviews from other venues as well as panels and symposia and of course “C-SPAN’s Q&A” and “Washington Journal.” All because of the sage of Lafayette, Indiana and son of Purdue Brian Lamb, a gentleman of the old school. I will have to talk today on my program about Brian Lamb with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of @Hillsdale College, who has himself been across from America’s most penetrating interviewer. I am certain Dr. Arnn will share with me and every other author who has sat across from Lamb, as well as those whose books have been searched by Peter Slen or Susan Swain, or videos curated and carefully collected by Howard Mortman, a deep appreciation for what they and their colleagues to numerous to mention, have built. Sam Feist is a great steward to carry CSPAN into its second 50 years. I hope Sam is searching for the next generation interviewer/host. @Continetti comes to mind. There are others. But it is all because of Brian Lamb, who had an idea. If you have Kirk’s Conservative Mind gathering dust somewhere, find it and read Chapter 8 about what it is many conservatives do: Keep alive institutions as they rebuild and reorganize and then return to center stage. CSPAN has kept alive the idea and the actual conduct of conversation, argument and debate. When its 50th birthday party rolls around by decade’s end, I hope all of Washington, D.C. and publishers everywhere find a way to salute Lamb and his tribe of curators.