Just as “core strength” is a cornerstone of personal physical fitness, awareness and exploration of truth—alignment with reality at the center of our lives—prepare us as productive communicators. A regimen of reaching out gives the individual stamina for the hard work of learning, as well as the pleasures of curiosity, self-reflection, and imagination.

For the body, the Mayo Clinic suggests strengthening one’s core muscles through such practices as Pilates (avoid the Biblical pronunciation here). Mayo provides a metaphor for the mind: Solid connections to sources of deep meaning stabilize us as good thinkers. Pontius Pilate, centered on himself, displayed his weakness by asking the infamous, dismissive question, “What is truth?”

If we extend this metaphor to our consumption of news and media, we realize it’s too easy these days to let our thoughts get flabby. To ensure that we’re fit for real life’s rough-and-tumble adventures, we need an exercise routine, but also an active spirit that eschews information obesity.

Our responsibility to think rightly—our duty to God who relates to us through mind and heart, reason and will, plus our duty to discern and share truth within the human community—requires that we seek out good food for thought. If we’re consuming news to play a constructive role as persons and citizens, we must prioritize.

Theologians could generate a phrase to describe this sense of duty, such as the “preferential option for the poor” in Catholic social doctrine. But they have left the communication analogies up to Substack writers. Here at Phronesis in Pieces, pondering the intersection of journalism, public affairs, culture, and Catholic values, let’s make our chosen priority enticingly specific.

Call it a preferential option for C-SPAN.

Students and researchers in several fields, especially history and a range of liberal arts, might generate a kindred phrase stating their principal interests, namely their preference for primary sources.

A primary source is the core of research. According to the Library of Congress, such a source is “a first-hand record of an event or topic created by a participant in, or witness to, that event or topic”—as close as possible to the origin point.

By the way, a secondary source is “second-hand information written or created after an event,” says the Library of Congress. It didn’t originate in “the room where it happened,” as Hamilton would sing.

The Cornell University Library adds that tertiary sources are “publications that summarize and digest” the primary or secondary information “to provide background on a topic, idea, or event.”

Oregon State University’s site liberally extends the possibilities to four “tiers” of sources. Tier IV is a super-sized bucket containing distractions and empty calories of content. Too many thinkers nowadays satisfy themselves from big gulps at this bucket.

The bottom tier comprises “agenda-driven or uncertain pieces” which are “mostly opinion, varying in thoughtfulness and credibility,” according to OSU. Social media, some videos, streaming platforms, and artificial intelligence seem to lurk in this dumbed-down category.

Champions for critical thinking will warn against super-sizing  the “vast wasteland” (a label given to TV in 1961). So many screens today are glued to dubious approximations of reality.

Just as in lifting weights, humans need a robust “cognitive load” that keeps exercising our brains with new information and ideas to sharpen our thinking and even deter dementia, noted neuroscientist and psychiatrist Daniel Amen said this month on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast. Beware of lazily settling for AI or cheaply manufactured content, he warned. Many of these providers collect more money “the more they steal your mind,” Amen told host Steven Bartlett.

The only danger equivalent to a lazy mind is a mind that has lost hope. Our coarsened, polarized culture has robbed many media consumers of trust in information and opinions they receive. A society that believes carelessness and manipulation have poisoned its news menu will fall prey to demagogues who toy with our fears and emotions.

Today’s communication industries certainly provide plenty of high-quality material, but we’re often ill-equipped to find it or use it. Purposeful participation in the marketplace of ideas requires zeal for the common good, a desire for understanding, insistence on excellence, enjoyment of fruitful debates, and collaborative habits of the heart.

These communication values aptly describe the preferential option for C-SPAN. That national treasure of the airwaves models good stewardship of democratic engagement. Watching C-SPAN, like staying fit as a citizen, is partly a state of mind.

The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, founded in 1979, has grown into three TV channels, a website, apps, a radio presence on SiriusXM, and a vast archive of videos capturing nationwide politics and policy debates from the past and present.

The collection of cable and satellite providers emerging in the 1970s joined to create C-SPAN as a non-profit organization which they would fund as a laudable public service.

This helped to ease resistance from over-the-air broadcasters, and it gradually built an audience of idea-connectors. Gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate is now accompanied by other government-related events (often shown live), plus interviews and features grouped as “Book TV” and “American History TV.”

What are the prerequisites demanded of, and inspired by, C-SPAN? Its audience expects timely, unfiltered, non-partisan coverage of people with authentic knowledge and experience, speaking for themselves and interacting with allies and opponents. Ideally, the viewers are motivated to bring wisdom to the public square and civil society.

C-SPAN fans get excited about meetings of minds which expose strengths and weaknesses across the American political spectrum. We patiently immerse ourselves in long-form learning, not unlike what occurs in a two-hour Joe Rogan podcast. Unlike Rogan’s forum, largely fueled by “observers,” the C-SPAN cadre finds itself virtually “in the room” where action occurs. We consume content and context, judging its nutritional value in real time. We also follow up by phoning into the network’s daily Q&A shows or making notes about online links to documents and organizations we should check out.

Of course, some meetings and minds veer off into chaos, embarrassments, and negative revelations, but we count these as worthwhile programming too.

Many C-SPAN offerings might drive family members and friends to flee, leaving their lovable policy wonk alone on the couch. But he or she might yet become a point of connection, enriching later conversations about public figures when grass-roots folks ask, “Is that guy for real?”

That’s the network’s secret superpower: It’s a cure not for insomniacs,  but for a sleepwalking electorate. It’s practically the only station where you might leave with a yen to do homework.

Through an unexplained technological blessing, C-SPAN is the first channel to appear when this writer navigates around his smart TV, abandoning the ocean of premium apps and streaming freebies and opting for the calmer waters of a standard cable system. The linear guide is full of scheduled distractions.

An inquisitive person, welcoming more data to make the world messier in a constructive way, can be captured instantly by an eccentric display of public affairs. C-SPAN’s voyages into the unknown, a talk at a New York bookstore or an Oval Office speech, suddenly override one’s plans to watch “appointment television”  like “Dr. Pimple-Popper” or “Futurama.”

Jesus is said to have made many of his most memorable encounters while he was on his way to somewhere else. Likewise, the spontaneity of America’s cinéma-verité network should be capturing more viewers because primary sources are at work. Of course, those we see are nowhere near on par with God, the ultimate primary source.

Recently, this public affairs fan happened upon an “Aspen Ideas” forum with retired U.S. General David Petraeus discussing “the warfare of tomorrow.” The video is also online, archived here.

Petraeus offered his own compelling reports about Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Middle East. He imparted facts and background but also urged Americans to learn and implement lessons for next-gen national defense. Without pontificating, he freed audience members to think for themselves in practical and personal ways. Aspen attendees and others came away with stories they could tell, which is the way humans learn most effectively.

For example, it occurred to at least one C-SPAN viewer that Petraeus called for meekness in our military leaders—and, by extension, our public officials. They must be no-nonsense and hard-driven, but also nimble in identifying and implementing changes in the status quo around them. Decision-makers must reach out promptly to form new partnerships and procedures. Using a thought-provoking phrase, he criticized “the military-industrial-congressional complex.”

Petraeus stirred imaginations and personal sensibilities in additional ways. Taiwan’s expanded contingency planning for war, he said, now goes beyond a military buildup to involve “whole-of-society resilience.” What might this mean—in Taiwan, or the U.S.?

Ukraine’s underdog status, he said, has forced it to become an amazing innovator, developing more and better drones which defeat its foe’s older weaponry. We must prepare for smaller, cheaper drones replacing costly, conventional defenses. Scenes from last year’s New Jersey drone conundrum sprang to mind.

Such glimpses of a brave new world can grab an audience’s minds and hearts, staying in everyone’s memory. New thoughts are born.

C-SPAN locates this constructive candor mostly in conversations and storytelling, not soundbites, and at times and places where knowledgeable sources are gathered to teach and learn.

Even if we’re only watching from afar, the act of convening helps us to see the big picture of legitimate individuals and organizations to which we owe some attention, for which we become appreciative.

We get to pick out our own heroes and villains, making politics personal, not relying on the pundits found in lower tiers of sources. Also, the hosts of C-SPAN programs, often ghost-hosts, respect what’s going on and humbly invite the audience to make up its own minds.

The network, while free-wheeling in many ways, makes us more aware that citizenship has a rhythm and rhyme. It summons us to consider the Congressional hearings held before a bill passes. It covers the whole magnificent, messy process—moving from a scandal to a brouhaha to an author promoting his book.  

Our nation’s official calendar, memorializing days of all sorts, takes on a life of its own when we watch the events that honor and examine past events. We see ourselves as members of something organic. This compelling notion might encourage a young person to study civics more seriously or an older person to take a job serving in an important institution.

This viewer can’t recall other stations in the cable listings that present such sources and situations so consistently and transparently, with impacts small or large. Nor do other stations have the overall credibility which citizens need in today’s ratings-crazed “wasteland” that plays fast and loose with reality. If those creators of trivia have a state of mind, it’s fuzzy logic.

While bottom-tier content erodes our cultural consciousness with flabby cognition, C-SPAN’s presence prods our conscience. It highlights our responsibility, under God or a different primary source, to speak truth to power and to salute the power of truth.

Shouldn’t we be vetting and critiquing the things our leaders say? Can’t we rise above media’s pedantic “fact-checking” to become more panoramic truth-seekers?

Newsrooms and the so-called legacy media are hobbled in their own marketplace. In some sense, each story is primarily true to its inherent nature as a commercially “processed” product.

Even fair-minded journalists perform filtration on each product, deciding which details can fit in the space, excluding related facts that muddle the narrative, and adopting assumptions and conventions. Fortunately, C-SPAN gives journalists a break from those pressures, welcoming them as episodic interviewers and experts.

The network’s unfiltered model is essential for free people to think dutifully, so much so that we should clone its worldview abundantly—at the levels of local and state government, as well as in business, civic institutions, and professions.

Perhaps some of the numerous public TV stations which are now losing federal funding can adopt this preferential paradigm—to give more people, from all walks of life and backgrounds, a vantage point and voice when leaders speak out and promise problem-solving.

The national C-SPAN network will take an additional step this fall in its mission to bring people together. Dasha Burns, White House bureau chief for Politico, will host a new series called “Ceasefire,” asking questions of Washingtonians whose political views clash.

Americans too often get a “sugar high” from the polemics and insults for which Washington is known, says Burns in an introductory video. The network wants to highlight alternative approaches, helping its guests to discover common ground.

This innovation comes at a time when C-SPAN has recognized that big changes are sweeping through the media; the network’s old paradigm, with joint funding by cable and satellite providers, awaits new business models.

We’re likely to see more appeals for the general public to support C-SPAN as a nonpartisan nonprofit, as a state of mind.

Americans need to be reality-lovers at our core. Especially if AI is racing to unseat humans as the world’s premier thinkers, our health as a nation and as individuals is at stake. We must connect with each other as admirable, and preferred, sources of first-hand truth.

For serious media consumers and wide-awake storytellers, hoping to use our screens to share wisdom and imagination among caring communities, C-SPAN should be part of a muscular, enjoyable routine. But let’s skip the Pilates—or at least reject the historical Pilate— and commit to be personal channels for the vital Q&A of real life.

Image from C-SPAN social media.