On the Air

The ratings will never approach those of Dynasty. There will be no car crashes, no steamy love scenes, not even a laugh track. Normally, that would be more than enough to prevent a television production from getting on the air. But last week, 42 years after broadcast coverage was first proposed and seven years after the House took to the airwaves, the U.S. Senate voted 67 to 21 to begin gavel-to-gavel TV and radio coverage on an interim basis.

On June 1, after a month of closed-circuit viewing on Capitol Hill, the Senate will permit four rip-roaring weeks of legislative action to be televised on c-span, the cable network that already brings the House to some 23 million homes. Then on July 29, the chamber will vote on whether cameras, lights and mikes should become permanent fixtures of "the world's greatest deliberative body."

To televise or not to televise has been a controversial question. The Senate killed three previous attempts, in 1981, 1982 and 1984, to allow video coverage. Those opposed to cameras in the chamber feared that exposure would forever alter the leisurely, idiosyncratic, old-boy nature of the Senate, which allows unlimited debate and endless quorum calls, and that the public would not understand or approve the legislators' arcane customs. "Unlimited debate," said Louisiana Democrat J. Bennett Johnston, "is not a pretty thing to watch on television . . . It is a messy, untidy spectacle to watch, but I think it is vital to the nation."

Proponents argued that the Senate was only postponing the inevitable. Minority Leader Robert Byrd, once an opponent of the camera's eye, cited more pragmatic reasons in its favor: "The Senate is fast becoming the invisible half of Congress. We cannot hold our own with the White House and the House of Representatives when it comes to news coverage of the important issues of the day."

Some Senators were concerned that television coverage would encourage showboating, as it has on occasion in the House, where the cameras often go on rolling at the end of each day's business so that members can deliver special one-minute speeches for home consumption. But the main effect of television in the House, says Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, a former Congressman, has been to make legislators more careful about their performances and floor speeches. The Senate, moreover, did not exactly throw itself open to video verite: the new rules preclude camera panning of the chamber to show empty seats or drowsing Senators.