Brian Patrick Lamb (; born October 9, 1941) is an American journalist. He is the founder, executive chairman, and the now-retired CEO of C-SPAN, an American cable network that provides coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate as well as other public affairs events. In 2007, Lamb was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush and received the National Humanities Medal the following year.
Prior to launching C-SPAN in 1979, Lamb held various communication roles including that of a telecommunications policy staffer for the White House and as the Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine. He also served as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy for four years. Lamb has conducted thousands of interviews, including those on C-SPAN's Booknotes and Q&A, where he was known for his unique interview style that focused on short, direct questions.
On October 9, 1941, Lamb was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and lived there until he was 22 years old. Growing up, he wanted to be an entertainer and spent time as a disc jockey and as a drummer in many local bands. Lamb showed an early interest in television and radio, starting his first radio job at WASK (AM)—a local station in Lafayette—at the age of 17. His job at the radio station gave him the opportunity to interview musicians including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Count Basie, and The Kingston Trio while he was still in high school.
After graduating from Jefferson High School, Lamb attended Purdue University. There, he was a member of Phi Gamma Delta and graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts in speech. During his junior year at the college in 1961, he coordinated a television program titled Dance Date that was similar to Dick Clark's ABC series, American Bandstand.
Following his graduation, Lamb was accepted into the Navy's Officer Candidate School. Upon completion of his training, he served 18 months on the attack cargo ship USS Thuban, and then moved to the Pentagon where he served in the audio/visual office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Lamb took up this role midway through the Vietnam War and, in addition to handling queries from radio and television networks, he attended press briefings with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
In July 1967, following riots in Detroit, Lamb was sent there tasked with providing recordings of news conferences of Governor George W. Romney of Michigan for the White House Situation Room. He also served as a White House social aide to Lyndon B. Johnson, escorting Lady Bird Johnson down the aisle at the wedding of Chuck Robb and Lynda Johnson. He later recalled, "For five years after I got out of the Navy and went back part of the time to Indiana, the only thing I was known to have ever done in my life was to escort Mrs. Johnson down the aisle." Lamb spent a total of four years in the U.S. Navy and was a junior grade Lieutenant at the time he left. He later said that his time in the U.S. Navy was "probably the most important thing I’ve ever done".
In December 1967, following his Navy service, Lamb's interest in politics led him to interview for the role of personal aide to Richard Nixon during his campaign for the 1968 presidential election, but, instead, he chose to return to Indiana. In August 1968, after working at a local television station in Lafayette, he spent ten weeks working for a group called "United Citizens for Nixon–Agnew". Following the campaign, he worked as a reporter for UPI Audio and, in 1969, became press secretary for Senator Peter H. Dominick. Afterwards, Lamb became an assistant for media and congressional relations to Clay T. Whitehead, then the director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy.
After the White House, Lamb returned to journalism as the editor of a biweekly newsletter entitled, The Media Report. While editing The Media Report, he also became the Washington bureau chief of trade magazine Cablevision for four years, covering telecommunications issues. During this time, he developed his idea of creating a public affairs-oriented cable network.
In 1977, Lamb submitted a proposal to cable television executives for a nonprofit channel that would broadcast official proceedings of Congress. He later said, "The risks weren't very significant. No one knew who I was. If I failed, so what?" The idea was approved in December 1977 and the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network was created as a private nonprofit business with a board of cable-operating company executives, funded by affiliate fees from cable companies. At its launch the network had a staff of four employees, including Lamb, and an annual budget of $450,000. The first broadcast occurred on March 19, 1979, with live coverage of the first televised House of Representatives floor debate.
By 2010, C-SPAN reached over 100 million households, and the network employed 275 individuals in Washington D.C. and at its archives in West Lafayette. Its coverage includes a variety of public affairs programming, including presidential press conferences and Senate hearings, in addition to its gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House and Senate. As of 2011, C-SPAN consists of three networks: C-SPAN, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3 plus a radio station, with more than 170,000 hours of C-SPAN footage available online via the C-SPAN Video Library. Lamb is the former CEO and president of C-SPAN, and now serves as executive chairman of its board of directors. He has described the network as "in every single way, the antithesis of commercial television".
In March 2012, Lamb announced his plan to step down as CEO, handing control over to Rob Kennedy and Susan Swain.
On C-SPAN, Lamb hosted Washington Journal, Booknotes, and continues to host Q&A, and through these programs has become known for his distinctive interview style. According to him, he learned the basics of broadcasting and interviewing from his high school broadcasting teacher, Bill Fraser, who taught him to "stay out of the way" while he conducted interviews.
Lamb does not discuss his own political views.
According to The Advocate, his style of interviewing is "Spartan", and he has stated: "Too many interviewers intrude too much.… They try to make us think they're smarter than the person they're interviewing. Well, I assume I'm not smarter and if I am smarter I don't want the audience to find out."
In his 35 years at C-SPAN, Lamb has conducted thousands of interviews, including 801 editions of Booknotes, a weekly program he hosted focusing on nonfiction books.
His first Booknotes interview was broadcast on April 2, 1989, and the final program aired on December 4, 2004. Over the course of the program, Lamb's interviewees included authors, politicians, and world leaders including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Richard Nixon, Colin Powell, Christopher Hitchens and Margaret Thatcher.
The program's format was described in its tagline, "One author, one book, one hour", and Lamb has stated that he spent an average of 20 hours reading and preparing for each interview, though by some counts he spoke for less than five minutes over the course of each program.
Lamb published five books based on Booknotes interviews, each a collection of essays written from transcripts of his interviews with authors. The books focus on writing, biographies of figures from American history, American history stories, "American character" and the life of Abraham Lincoln, respectively.