Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
Listening, Not Lecturing: Lessons for the Next Generation of Journalists with Sam Feist
Roger welcomes Sam Feist, longtime journalist and CEO of C-SPAN, for a conversation about why the role of nonpartisan reporting and transparency remains essential to the future of journalism and public trust.
They discuss the importance of unfiltered access to government, the challenge of maintaining neutrality in a polarized media environment, and the upcoming launch of "Ceasefire," a program designed to foster civil dialogue and bipartisan common ground. Feist also reflects on lessons learned from covering historic events like 9/11, producing landmark debate programs, and interviewing world leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Yitzhak Rabin. Plus, how young journalists can prepare for meaningful careers, and why balanced reporting is vital to a healthy democracy.
Sam Feist previously served as Washington bureau chief and senior vice president at CNN, where he produced award-winning coverage of major political events and breaking news. Over his career he has interviewed U.S. presidents, prime ministers, and other world leaders, earning five Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. He is active in several professional organizations and now leads C-SPAN in its mission to provide Americans with fair, unfiltered access to their government.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact. Today I'm your host, roger Ream. It's a pleasure to welcome Sam Feist to today's show. Sam is the CEO of C-SPAN, a television network that every American has at least passing familiarity with and many of us watch regularly. Prior to C-SPAN, sam held a series of leadership roles at CNN, including serving as Washington bureau chief and senior vice president. He produced many of CNN's newscasts and programs, including Crossfire, inside Politics, the Capital Gang, evans Novak Late Edition and Wolf Blitzer Reports. Sam has interviewed many world leaders, including all five of our past presidents, prime ministers such as Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, and Itzhak Rabin, and many, many others. He's the recipient of five Emmys and one Peabody Award for his reporting coverage. Sam's active in many organizations too many for me to name, but I'll name a few anyway the Washington Economic Club, the Bar of the District Columbia, the National Press Club, journalism Institute. I'm delighted to have him join our Liberty and Leadership podcast today.
Speaker 1:Welcome, sam. Thanks so much, roger. Well, let me dive into some questions about C-SPAN. To begin, it's known has this great reputation for unfiltered, nonpartisan access to government proceedings, including both houses of Congress. We've had Brian Lamb at one of our awards dinners, honored him for his leadership of C-SPAN, and now you're there. Why do you think the transparency that C-SPAN offers is so vital to the health of our democracy?
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, in our country in recent years we've really sorted ourselves in ways that I don't think are good for the country Blue neighborhoods, red neighborhoods, red media, blue media, red colleges, blue colleges. Americans who might live near each other are watching different things, hearing different things, hearing different perspectives, sometimes hearing different versions of the truth. I think that's unfortunate and that's just how we've sorted ourselves. C-span is a little different. We've worked really hard to stay above the partisan fray. We've worked really hard to make sure that everyone knows our mission is to give you the raw material of American politics, the events unfiltered, whether it's in Congress or the president or a cabinet secretary hearing or an event. We work to be as balanced as we can in what events we cover and what we put on our air, and the result of that is that our audience is the most balanced audience in American television. Our audience is 30% Republican, 30% Democrat, 36% Independent and 4% Other.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, I think for the country, nobody else in media of any flavor can say that Part of the result of us working so hard to stay balanced make sure that we don't put our thumb on the scale is that we've been rewarded with an audience that actually represents America. So we work hard to do that every day. If a Republican is president, there'll be more Republicans on, because the president and his or her cabinet are on TV more. If a Democrat's president, sure, there'll be more Democrats on. But otherwise, I think if you watch C-SPAN and you watch the events that we cover and the choices that we make about what we cover, I think, regardless of your political or ideological background, you will believe oh yeah, c-span's been fair to us and I think that's the answer.
Speaker 1:Well, let me go back a little to first ask you what drew you into journalism. Like me, you went to Vanderbilt as an undergrad. You got a law degree, yet you ended up in journalism.
Speaker 2:So when I was at Vanderbilt I had done what a lot of student journalists do an editor of the student newspaper and reporter and wanted to go into journalism but thought about going to law school right after college, was given great advice by a gentleman who also went to Vanderbilt named Fred Graham and you may know him as at the time he was the chief Supreme Court correspondent for CBS News. But he later went on to found and anchor Court TV, which everybody knows, and his advice was if you want to be a journalist, go be a journalist. You can always get a law degree later. So I took his advice.
Speaker 2:So I left college, went to become a journalist, went to work for CNN, got lucky and got an entry-level job and got a law degree part time at night while I was working at CNN. So never really wanted to be a lawyer, just thought it'd be a helpful degree. But I was always interested in journalism, really never fancied myself as very ideological at all, never could see myself as a Democrat or as a Republican, but I love politics. For me, political journalism might be a way to have a front row seat to politics without actually picking one side or another, which never really felt comfortable for me.
Speaker 1:We run a journalism program at TFAS and I've heard from our professor of the journalism course that increasingly he saw students coming to the program who were going into journalism because they had an agenda they wanted to push and he thought that was disappointing to him because he went to journalism school and became a journalist for USA Today actually to go tell the story, report the news, what he sees, and he thought it was unfortunate. More students are driven by a political agenda and ideology in that field.
Speaker 2:I actually agree with that gentleman. Our job is to be the eyes and ears for the public in places where they can't be the eyes and ears. Tell them what's happening, go to places they can't go. Go into the room where an event is happening, describe it, tell the public what happened and then let the public make up their own mind, because everybody can't be everywhere at once, so you need somebody to be there for you.
Speaker 2:My view of journalism is that this notion that we are reporters, reporters' job is to tell an audience what you see, what you hear, what happened Sometimes, explain why, if you can also do that without getting into an ideological perspective, and sometimes you explain how. None of those, in my opinion, should have an ideological leaning bias. I don't believe it's a journalist's job to tell you who to vote for, who should win or even who would do a better job. I think we tell you everything that you can learn about a candidate or a party or a policy or a platform, and then you make up your own mind. The moment we begin to tell you whose policy is better, who's a better human being, who will do a better job, then we don't have the credibility the next time because the audience will think I've already picked sides. My whole career I've tried to subscribe to this notion that it's not up to me. I don't get to decide who wins or loses, and I shouldn't be telling you who to vote for.
Speaker 1:I know it's hard to maintain that kind of perspective in a town where we live that's so political, where you run into the political people at dinner parties and wherever you go. But it takes a strong commitment to that and I admire that. Let me ask you what attracted you to C-SPAN when you accepted the job there.
Speaker 2:So I grew up watching C-SPAN. When I was in middle school we moved from Tennessee to a small town in Connecticut a little bit of culture shock. But in that small town and a lot of places around the country before cable TV, if you were not near a major city you could barely get the broadcast networks. So you might have those big aerials on your house. In our case we could get a little bit of New York television and maybe one Hartford station, but none of them very well. The early days of cable TV in many cases grew to solve for that problem. In our case we got cable TV mostly so that we could have TV and it came with C-SPAN because it was just after C-SPAN launched. So I grew up watching C-SPAN at home. I was even a high school bit of a political junkie.
Speaker 2:Fast forward to last year I'd been at CNN for a long time. I've got to call it Brian Lamb, the founder, and Susan Swain and Rob Kennedy the then CEOs, were going to retire last year, in 2024. And was I interested? And I did something you should probably never do if a recruiter calls you and that's immediately say, yes, I want that job. But that's what I did because that was my first reaction, because it's an incredibly important place. It's a nonprofit, it has a mission, it does something that no other news or television outlet in America does covers our government unfiltered and I thought it would be a great fit for me and that I can make a difference.
Speaker 1:Well, you've been there about a year. You've no doubt identified opportunities and challenges, but you did make an announcement recently of a new program that's going to air this fall called Ceasefire. Ceasefire A little bit of a take maybe, on when you were producing Crossfire at CNN, but tell us about the motivation and kind of what that show's all about.
Speaker 2:Off and on during my CNN career, I produced Crossfire, which was this raucous debate program, intended to be a raucous debate program, with hosts on the right and the left, including Bob Novak. Including Bob Novak, who I may owe my career to Bob Novak because I saw him come. Everything goes back to Vanderbilt for you and me, roger. He spoke at Vanderbilt when I was a student and I went on to apply for an internship with his program, the Evans and Novak program, and I ended up coming to Washington for summer. But unexpectedly, I also worked on the Crossfire program. So that was my first entry into national journalism. But throughout my career at CNN I worked on the program. I was the executive producer of the program and I really enjoyed it. I thought there was a real purpose of laying out what did the left say, what did the right say, what did the Republicans say, what did the Democrats say, and have a debate. But you know one of the hosts of Crossfire, legendary progressive columnist named Michael Kinsley. When he left Crossfire to go and run Slate Magazine, we had lunch and he pulled me aside and he said you know, sam, one day you should think about this program, maybe a different program, a program that maybe you'd call it Ceasefire where the goal of the program is to look for compromise and common ground and see if you can have a civil conversation. He said I love Crossfire, there's a purpose for Crossfire, but something to think about. And I maybe nodded and said, okay, yeah, maybe, but I've had that voice in my head for 20 years and I got to C-SPAN and that's a place you could really do this. So we're launching a program this fall, not too long from now, where the goal of the program is to have that constructive conversation, have a Democrat and a Republican on with the purpose of figuring out where do we agree.
Speaker 2:We all know the areas where Republicans and Democrats disagree. We never talk about where we agree, and I'm one of those people that believes that almost every case, there's more that Republicans, Democrats, americans of all political stripes agree on than we disagree, but we never talk about that. So that's what this show is going to do. Is there room for compromise on an issue right now? Is there room for common ground? Even if you can't get your entire policy, can you get some of it? Ronald Reagan always used to say if I get 80% of my policy, I win, but now, in 2025,. I don't think that belief is shared by people in either party, so we're going to see if we can find some common ground.
Speaker 1:We've made some attempts at that in our student programming. I know a few years ago we had Senator Ron Wyden, a liberal Democrat, and Senator Rand Paul, kind of a libertarian Republican, together on a program talking about things they agreed about. Did they find a few things? We've done some, oh yeah, yeah they do. Maybe I'll have them on ceasefire and they'd be good on some of the issues related to the intelligence bills that want to monitor American activities. And also we've done some Braver Angels debates.
Speaker 2:What makes this interesting for me is there's no other program on television that's doing this. People talk about it. We need more civility in our politics. People talk about trying to reach across the aisle, but perhaps because of the fractured media environment or the economics of cable news, I don't know it's just not happening. I think C-SPAN's a good place to do it, to host it. What will make it special is nobody else is doing it. So it's a place that, if you're a little tired of the noise, come check out C-SPAN.
Speaker 1:One of the things that C-SPAN offers that I think it's one of my favorites, at least personally, is the book, tv and the treatment you have of. Well, there's still a lot of material to cover the president or committee hearings.
Speaker 2:But on the weekends, official Washington is a little more quiet. We dedicate 24 hours of coverage to history TV and 24 hours to book TV. That is something that we're going to continue, I would say, over the course of the next year and a quarter, as we go through the rest of 2025 and into 2026, as America celebrates our 250th birthday. We'll probably do more book TV authors and American history or the American Revolution, some of our founding fathers but, yes, book TV is very popular. The same C-SPAN viewers who might watch a committee hearing or the president during the week would be interested in a biography about Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson and in book TV. Even if we're doing a history book, we'll apply. What have we seen? What does that subject of that book say about America today? Happy, not so happy.
Speaker 1:We do a lot with young people who are interested in careers in journalism. What would be your advice to a young person? Is it still a career worth pursuing? Absolutely, roger. 100%. It's incredibly rewarding. It's incredibly. What would be your advice to a young person? Is it still a career worth pursuing with the media? Absolutely, roger, like it is today 100%.
Speaker 2:It's incredibly rewarding. It's incredibly important. Now, as I said earlier, I fancy myself not an ideological journalist, and I know that some of your viewers say that's not possible Everybody has their opinions but I actually think it is. I actually have spent my entire career recognizing that my job is to give you information and it's your job to have the opinions, the perspectives, to make a voting decision. There are ideological journalists and publications and there's room for people who are conservatives, who want to work for a conservative publication. But I think there's a big opportunity and I think there's a yearning for journalism to return to its roots and just report the facts, just report what's happening and let people decide.
Speaker 2:Pendulum swing in politics and media. I feel like it has swung one way to this sorting of media outlets and I hope it swings another way so that we're a little less sorted. What I hope for, and I think we're missing right now, is that we're not all reading the same thing and watching the same thing, and I think that's valuable for the country, because let's agree on a set of facts what happened yesterday and then we'll talk about what should happen and what should the political implication be. But when we disagree on what happened is where it gets tricky. I think there's an opportunity for journalists down the middle, journalists and yes, folks with perspectives. There are more outlets than ever. We are on a video podcast right. 15 years ago there was no such thing. There are video podcasts with enormous audiences, medium audiences, targeted programs, big programs, small programs. The country needs journalists.
Speaker 1:We need them especially in our communities. Local news, television stations, local news, what we used to call papers are frequently now digital outlets. The country needs them, and so I'd be dating myself here. But let me ask you, looking back at your time in journalism, were there certain moments that big events occurred, that kind of stick with you, or they were profound moments in your career?
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean every journalist working on 9-11, no matter at what level and what community. We'll never forget that day because every community in America was affected. It just so happened that I was at CNN. You know, cnn was the dominant news channel in the United States and, to be honest, around the world in 2001. We believe more people watched our coverage of 9-11 than any other place in the world and it was an extraordinary moment, extraordinary day and incredibly difficult day, because I produced six hours of our coverage that day. You know, cnn scrambled to get our act together.
Speaker 2:I was assigned my team okay, you're going to produce 6 pm to midnight, and we had access to our reporters around the world. So there we were, with reporters in all of the affected cities, but also in Afghanistan, and it was like nothing else I could have ever imagined. Our staff was emotional. They didn't know if they knew people in the World Trade Center or at the Pentagon, or we had New York staff and Washington staff and they did their job incredibly professionally. I've never been more proud of anything I've been a part of than 9-11. So that, to me, was the day I will never forget. But I produced election nights, whether it was the night that Barack Obama won or the night that Donald Trump won 2008 and 2016. Extraordinary evenings, incredibly important for the country. The course of history on both of those nights changed significantly, also unforgettable also interviewed a lot of prominent leaders, American presidents, prime ministers.
Speaker 1:What lessons do you have for, say, young people about how to approach interviewing someone like a Donald Trump or a Barack Obama or Mikhail Gorbachev?
Speaker 2:Every interview is different and different interviews whether someone's in office or out of office makes a big difference. The interview that I was involved in that strikes me as maybe the most important was an interview that we did for the Evans and Novak program of Yitzhak Rabin, right before he died I think it was 1994. It was his last interview done in English before he was assassinated and it was the most hopeful interview because it felt like Israel and the Palestinians and the Arab world may be on the cusp of something unimaginable. And you think about that moment. He was in Washington, visiting, I think, with President Clinton and others, and met with Yasser Arafat and it felt like something big was changing and of course that's why he was assassinated, because he was assassinated by someone who didn't want that to happen. But then you fast forward now, 30-something years since then, and the mess that is the Israeli-Palestinian I mean what happened on October 7th and what's happened since October 7th in Gaza and you realize how things can change. This hopeful moment In terms of advice for young journalists it doesn't matter whether you're interviewing a school board member, a member of Congress, it doesn't matter who it is Prepare, prepare, prepare and, most importantly, every good interview.
Speaker 2:You listen, you may have your list of 15 questions that you have time to get to. You assume that they're going to take a minute or two to answer each question. There may be a follow-up in that question or you may be able to have a little bit of a conversation. But it only works if you listen to their answers. And so many interviewers I would say most of them are not great interviewers. They don't listen. They go to their questions and get the news out and if they just listen, they'll probably learn something that nobody expected. I would say that's true for any interviewer, and it doesn't matter whether that person is a head of state or a local official.
Speaker 1:I've had the opportunity twice to meet Margaret Thatcher. What was the context in which you interviewed her?
Speaker 2:She had just become a former prime minister of the United Kingdom and she had come out with her book. But she was just this legendary figure Among women of the world. There was no one who towered higher than Margaret Thatcher. She was incredibly gracious. Towered higher than Margaret Thatcher. She was incredibly gracious, even though she was not an officeholder. It felt so important. I remember she stood up straight and sat perfectly, and it's not that she didn't smile, but she was very much on I guess that's who she was the aura around her. Usually former officeholders, you don't feel that quite the same way, but that wasn't true with Margaret Thatcher. For me, it was an extraordinary moment.
Speaker 1:I remember, recall when I met her at Westminster at a reception and she said to me do you know what a woman and a teabag have in common? I said no, you never know how strong they are until they get into hot water and I thought that kind of captured her.
Speaker 2:Well, she exuded that strength Certainly even after she left office. You felt like this was a very strong leader, woman, human being.
Speaker 1:Do you think C-SPAN in addition to the ceasefire which you've announced, which sounds like a fascinating program I look forward to seeing will do other types of original programming like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we definitely will, and we'll have some more that may start even this fall. However, our core mission is, if Congress is in session, if the president is speaking, if there's a national event, is to make sure that people have access to that. So what I don't want to do is develop so much original programming at C-SPAN that in any way it competes with the events which are bread and butter, because nobody else is doing that. So I want to make sure that our priority are these public affairs events giving Americans the ability to see their government in action. Our programming beyond that is intended to help put that into perspective. So what did you mean, congressman, when you said that?
Speaker 2:On the House floor we have a morning program, which is a good time because there's not much happening in official Washington at 7 am. We're the only national TV program where we hear from the American people. Every day we take calls equal numbers from Republicans and Democrats and independents. We do that every morning. Someone before I got to C-SPAN said the only way you really know who's going to win an election, listen to the calls on C-SPAN Polls only tell you who the person says they think they might vote for. The callers give you the amount of passion that each side feels for their candidate or how much angst they have for the other candidate, and you can really get a sense of it. And if you just watch and listen to these calls, you'll realize who's active right now, who's motivated, you can get a sense of who's likely to vote and who's likely to do everything they can to make sure this person wins or loses. And you don't get that from polls.
Speaker 1:Explain to me how C-SPAN operates. It's a nonprofit corporation. Your money come from appropriation from Congress. We do not.
Speaker 2:Zero dollars in government funding. We have never asked for nor received a dollar from any government entity, from the United States government or any taxpayer. We are privately funded and by privately funded we are funded almost entirely by the television distributors. If you get your television from a cable company like Comcast, Xfinity or Charter Spectrum or Verizon Fios, a tiny fraction of your cable fee, your monthly fee, goes to C-SPAN Seven and a quarter cents a month, Same for satellite or streaming services. So if you have a TV bundle that you pay for, a tiny fraction goes to C-SPAN and that's basically what funds us. We have some small dollar contributions and we invite people. If they want to support C-SPAN, please support C-SPAN, go on our website. You're welcome to donate.
Speaker 2:But we do not get government funding. Nor do we want government funding because we cover Congress. We do not want to be caught up in the appropriation process and have it affect us. That's almost by definition for us a bit of a conflict of interest. So we've never asked for, nor sought, nor received government funding. So thank you television distributors for a tiny little bit and thank you to everybody who pays that seven cents a month to us, which by comparison most television networks is a dollar or $2 a month. Some of the sports networks can be $10 a month. So, or $2 a month. Some of the sports networks can be $10 a month, so we're just a tiny little fraction of your cable bill, but for that you get three channels and no commercials.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and good content. I think that's a wise way of organizing yourself and it's working. So you've been healthy and hopefully we'll continue to grow.
Speaker 2:Well, and if you have a television service that doesn't have C-SPAN, please just reach out and say why don't you have C-SPAN? It's the least expensive television service you can have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know that's been a controversy. Some of the streaming services have been a little slow on the uptink.
Speaker 2:We don't run ads. I completely understand that we don't want to run ads. We want to try to keep ourselves out of the political fray. But some of the streaming services have come along and those that haven't. Well, hopefully they'll join the party.
Speaker 1:Yeah or lose customers. Correct Absolutely Vote yeah or lose customers. Graduates from our summer programs here in Washington and trying to prepare them to be courageous leaders of honorable leaders, do you have some advice you could offer young people?
Speaker 2:Yes, the most important piece of advice is do not get your news via scrolling. When you do, somebody else has edited the content for you and taken the decision away from you of what's important. Check your sources. Reliable sources of information have never been more important and, even if you think one might lean in one direction or another, I would prefer for you to get your news from CNN and Fox News than a source that you're not familiar with. Cnn and Fox News are big companies, which means they're subject to lawsuit if they say something defamatory. They may not agree with each other on everything. They can be reliable sources.
Speaker 2:Read newspapers or try to get access if you can, and if you're in school, you frequently can get free subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Those are two outstanding publications where their news pages are important. Their editorial pages come from different perspectives. If you read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times editorial page and the, if you read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times editorial page and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal news pages, and add in the Washington Post, you're a pretty well-informed American. There may be things in there that you disagree with, and that's okay. Feel free to have an intellectual argument with it, but you'll be informed If you get your news from scrolling. That could easily have been manipulated by AI no-transcript.
Speaker 1:All our students in our next program cycle and before we close, you mentioned Bob Novak. Before we sponsor the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowships. Any other stories You've spoken at our dinners in the past? We've moved that dinner to New York but we'll have to get you up there. But any other Bob Novak stories you want to share?
Speaker 2:Bob Novak, you know, was a legendary political columnist as I was growing up and from 1980 to, I would say, 2005, was maybe one of the most frequent television commentators. Pundits, crossfire, capital Gang, meet the Press, the Evans and Novak program A conservative pundit is the way most people thought of him. I thought of him as one of the best reporters alive. His columns, which were the most distributed syndicated columns in the country, were news columns. He had a rule Every column he had to break some news and I really appreciated that. He was an incredible reporter, so much so, and he worked at the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press before becoming a columnist.
Speaker 2:I have bought hundreds and hundreds of copies of his book the Prince of Darkness, which was his autobiography, his memoir. I give it to young reporters not people who want to be conservative or liberal or any other kind of reporter, but just want to be a reporter Because in it it's a masterclass on how to be a terrific reporter, how to break news, how to develop sources. It also gives you 50 years of political history, so the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s that a young reporter may not have the context for. I've definitely bought many of those books, handed them out still do. I think it's a great memoir. He's a great guy. People refer to him as the Prince of Darkness because there was always gruff and grumpy seeming and he had a heart of gold. He was a wonderful human being and I miss him terribly.
Speaker 1:That is a great book. It's a history of American politics from 1960 or so to when it was published and what a life he had. We give it to all the recipients of the fellowships every year to read. I'm told that the submitted manuscript is twice as long as the published book. I'd love to get the other half and the published book, roger.
Speaker 2:it's a couple inches thick. I'd love to read the other half. I would too. It's such a great book. You can find it. It's still out there in paperback. It's a really great memoir from a guy who had a perspective that was completely unique in American political journalism.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining me, Sam, Congratulations on this position at C-SPAN. It's a great network and I look forward to continued success under your leadership.
Speaker 1:Thanks, very much Thanks for having me today and I look forward to covering some more of your events. Good, appreciate it. Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
