Putting Legislators in Every Home

Paul Koplin is trying to bring the Legislature into every home in the state that is wired for cable television.

You may wonder why. The Legislature is not the state’s most popular institution. But Koplin is a true believer in his product, Cal-Span, the nonprofit network that has been providing coverage of the Assembly.

Koplin is a political junkie who persists in taking on impossible liberal causes.

He was marketing director for New Perspectives Quarterly, an earnest magazine famous for a seriousness that even daunts serious readers. He must have been good. NPQ is still around. Then Koplin organized the surprise grass-roots campaign that helped pass California’s new gun-control law.

Los Angeles has been a hard sell. In San Francisco, Cal-Span is available to every cable-equipped home. Just 34% of cable homes in the city of L.A. receive Cal-Span, and the percentage is much lower in the rest of the county.

You’d think Koplin, Cal-Span president, would at least be able to snag some time on Los Angeles’ municipal Channel 35. All you can see there now are City Council meetings and slides promoting city services. But the city said no. It’s a city channel, city officials explained. Why give time to legislators?

Maybe it’s just that council members fear looking shabby next to the elegant Willie Brown and his crew. Whatever the reason, Koplin is stymied. As a result, the Legislature, pretty much ignored by commercial and public television, will remain a shadowy institution here, covered only by print reporters. And as able as they may be, these journalists know that there are no words to describe some of the legislators.

The whole thing is frustrating to Koplin, who is convinced he has a hot product. People are hungry, he said, to watch the actions and antics of the people who raise their taxes and provide money for health, schools, highways and public transit.

I got a hint of that interest in my Sacramento days when I was host of a program, on the local public television station, called “State of the Capitol.”

The station was located in a ramshackle wood-and-stucco building dangerously close to the Sacramento River. Because of budget problems, there often was only one camera. I was a bumbling interviewer. And even I thought most of my guests were boring.

I held the non-paying job for two seasons, leaving only after a dispute with management over production. It started when my wife, Nancy, persuaded me to interview her boss, Sam Wood, head of an environmental organization called California Tomorrow.

Sam was a crusty, articulate character and the interview seemed to go well. But what Sam and I didn’t know was that because of an equipment malfunction, Sam’s microphone was picking up the signal from Sacramento’s soft music station. Every time Sam spoke, Mantovani came out over the air.

Sam was pretty mad at the station and so was I. I quit.

But despite the crudity of the production, people watched the thing. It may have been an early manifestation of something that smart people discovered a few years later, a hunger for news--plain, unvarnished news, delivered simply but in length, with no fancy network correspondent offering an interpretation.

One of the smart people was Ted Turner, the founder of CNN. The conventional news experts thought his experiment would flop. But it was clear, from CNN’s very first day--when his underpaid, untrained correspondents went on the air with storms, crimes and politics--that Turner was on to something.

Another was Brian Lamb, who founded C-Span, which provides cable with gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate and House, plus uncut telecasts of many public-affairs events.

That brings us back to Koplin, hard at work trying to bring Cal-Span to Los Angeles.

His biggest conquest has been Century Cable, whose vice president, Bill Rosendahl, is of the Ted Turner-Brian Lamb school. Before Cal-Span, Century was providing interview shows, issues-oriented specials, commentaries and live telecasts of public meetings to an audience including Santa Monica, L.A.’s Westside, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

The biggest no-sale was the Continental system, serving 300,000 households in Los Angeles County. Continental official John Gibbs said the system, which carries C-Span, didn’t have a spare channel for the Cal-Span telecasts.

Koplin will continue knocking on doors. Next year, he’s adding state Senate coverage to his product line, as well as specials such as important state Supreme Court hearings.

For the young man who got people to subscribe to New Perspectives Quarterly and support gun control, nothing is impossible.