The Trump White House is siding with C-SPAN in its effort to pressure YouTube TV to carry the public affairs channel on streaming video — though Google, YouTube’s parent company, is balking at carrying the channel.
C-SPAN is a non-profit company that was created by for-profit cable companies to provide televised access to important government events and proceedings, particularly on the federal level. It is limited in its ability to sell advertising, which is why streaming TV services have tended to avoid carrying it. However, C-SPAN argues that it is providing an important public service that viewers should be able to access on any network.
C-SPAN’s home page currently links to a Washington Post op-ed by Karen Tumulty (behind a paywall) that notes:
In many instances — such as recent contentious congressional town halls in lawmakers’ districts — C-SPAN is the only network that carries events from start to finish, rather than, say, the sound bites picked up by other networks.
But as more and more people are cutting the cable cord, C-SPAN is hemorrhaging viewers. Where in 2013 it reached about 100 million households, what it offers now can be found on televisions in only 51 million. (There are about 69 million households with pay-TV services.)
Many of those viewers have migrated to live TV streaming services. Some, such as DirecTV Stream, carry C-SPAN, but the two largest — YouTube TV (owned by Google) and Hulu + Live TV (owned by Disney) — do not.
A Trump White House official posted Tumulty’s article on X, adding positive commentary. That post was then re-posted by the Trump White House “Rapid Response 47” account.
President Trump is known to enjoy watching C-SPAN, which is the only network that regularly carries replays of his events, including White House meetings and campaign rallies.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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