The C-SPAN Bus visited UT’s campus on Thursday, Jan. 17, as part of its Southern Swing tour to engage with UT students, faculty and staff.

The bus, first parked outside of Neyland Stadium and then the Baker Center, was a way to get out of the rain for a few minutes and learn a little about politics.

C-SPAN is a private, not-for-profit television network based out of Washington, DC, that deals mostly with politics. The main goal of the network is to provide unfiltered and unbiased news about what is happening in the United States government. They live stream meetings in the House of Representatives, Senate and Congress, as well as conduct interviews with government officials from a nonpartisan perspective.

They are mostly funded by cable companies, getting about $0.06 a month from each cable user. This allows them to be confident about their claim to be unbiased as they are not funded by the government.

The C-SPAN Bus is designed to help visitors get a taste of what C-SPAN has to offer as a network. The bus is full of tablets which give access to some of the most recent videos that C-SPAN has to offer on their website. The tablets give only a small taste of C-SPAN’s online video library, which has over 250,000 hours of documented content dating back to 1987. The topics of the videos ranged from “White House” to “Pop Culture.”

The bus not only featured videos, but also employees such as Jenae Green, C-SPAN marketing representative, who greeted guests as they entered.

“One thing that I love stressing to our college students is that if you’re up at 3 a.m., living on Redbull and coffee … you can use our transcribed video library to get direct quotes for research papers,” Green said.

The bus also has a mobile studio which is used to conduct live interviews with elected officials, allowing them to speak to the public directly.

One of the reasons that the C-SPAN Bus made a stop at UT was its connection to the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy located on campus.

“We were happy to host the bus … Senator Baker was a strong proponent of transparency in government and advocated for C-SPAN to have access to televise the Senate,” Dr. Katie A. Cahill, associate director at the Baker Center, said. “The Center thinks that it is vitally important that students and the community are informed about the issues confronting the nation. We hope that having the C-SPAN bus on campus will spark curiosity about the governing process.”

“Howard H. Baker Jr. helped get the cameras in the Senate that we use on C-SPAN,” Green said when asked why they decided to stop at UT. “He was a great friend of our founder Brian Lamb when he was in D.C.”

The C-SPAN Bus will be visiting Central High School on Friday after leaving UT. Following that, it will continue its tour around the country, hoping to spark interest in politics and the government in every person who steps in its doors.