I do not think it slowed down things at all. I think the presence there became almost commonplace, and it is something that we became familiar with, we're not concerned about.

It did not really interfere one way or the other with the legislative process.

Chairman METCALF. Thank you very much, Mr. Rebman.

Mr. REBMAN. We would like to point out, Mr. Chairman, that I do have a prepared statement in addition to the tape presentation, and I would like to submit that at this time.

Chairman METCALF. It will be incorporated at this point.

Mr. REBMAN. There is one further thought I have, and that is we would like to suggest to the committee that for the sake of some of your good colleagues, you might add as your witness the president of the National Football League Referee Association, who for years-at least, the Nation believed football referees were incompetent, and along came television, and suddenly the poor referees got a 200-millionmember fan club, holding many now to be one heck of a hard-working, well-educated group which make decisions under the worst possible circumstances.

Chairman METCALF. We are told, however, that one of the Monday football announcers, Mr. Howard Cosell, is taking direct aim at the Senate of the United States. I do not know whether his activities on Monday night football are going to help him or hurt him.

Representative DELLENBACK. Mr. Chairman, did you notice, with reference to the man you just saluted, there was a report recently about comparison of name familiarity with public trust?

Chairman METCALF. Yes, I thought that was a very interesting discussion.

We are honored to have you, Representative Birchfield. Do you wish to add to an already splendid presentation?

HON. WILLIAM O. BIRCHFIELD, STATE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE STATE OF FLORIDA

William Birchfield, 38, is chairman of the House Committee on Insurance of the Florida State Legislature. A practicing attorney in Jacksonville, he has been instrumental in securing state appropriations for coverage of the Florida legislature by public television. A graduate of the University of Florida with a bachelor's degree in agricultural sciences, he was first elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1970.

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do not have any original thoughts. I am sure after what you have already heard that there is little I could add, but I would like to give you some perspective, or to give you some idea, some of the things that occurred in Florida, which may or may not be helpful to your consideration of the subject. We meet annually for 60 consecutive days, and in the interim, we have meetings regularly scheduled on about a monthly basis, for about a 4-day period.

During our 60-day session, all of our meetings, committee meetings, have been opened to the press, and that includes television, and they have, of course, come and go when they chose, and they have shown that is what they wanted to do.

Starting last year, that would have been my third year in the legislature, 2 years without it, and 1 year with it, so we began gavel-togavel coverage by public television of the actual floor sessions, and public television does not have enough cameras to take on all of our committee meetings at one time, so there is some hunt and peck involved, and of course, we chairmen sometimes will disagree with who has the most sex appeal, but I do not think any of us can quarrel in retrospect with the areas they have chosen to take.

I do not think that we have had any big disruption in the house. We have two cameras—one by the speaker's podium, one in the rear of the chamber-and, of course, our body is substantially smaller than your House. We are 120 members. We would be about comparable in size to your Senate in terms of logistics.

We have had several rule changes, I think, that have come about as a result of this, although in terms of streamlining our procedures, this has been done several years ago with government in sunshine, but fulltime television coverage has brought on some different wages, and really, I do not know if there is so much good government as good manners and good decorum.

For instance, until we got public television full time, we took sandwiches to the floor of the house, read newspapers, this kind of thing, and that has suddenly come to a stop, and everyone's desk is clean and that at least he looks presentable, so this type of thing will evolve, whether you enact it in the form of a rule or not, it just happens. We are going to see a number of changes in the way we operate. There is consideration whether we should have a night session so that the public can see us live.

As it is now, our sessions are recapped at the end of a day in about 112-hour segments, and shown on our station in Jacksonville, about 10:30, so that is one of the things that may come out of it.

Chairman METCALF. Representative Birchfield, will you yield to me for just a minute?

Every time you see somebody hand me one of these yellow slips, it means that I am on my way over to the Senate to vote.

I want to announce that the hearing scheduled for next Tuesday on March 12 will be postponed until Wednesday, March 20, at 10 a.m. The hearing will be in the House Office Building. If my colleagues will defer to me just for moment more, I want to express my gratitude to National Public Radio, which is again broadcasting the hearings, and which has used these hearings to demonstrate some of the possibilities of radio broadcast coverage of Congress.

We talked so much about television today, but certainly a medium which is splendid for covering committee hearings is radio. I am delighted that NPR is here.

I will be unable to come back, because I am told there will be another vote for final passage of the minimum wage bill in just a few minutes. I thank you for coming. I congratulate you for a splendid presentation, and now I turn the hearing over to my experienced and devoted colleague, Congressman Cleveland, who twice has presided over the Joint Committee. He is in charge.

Representative DELLENBACK. I thought my great day was coming.

Chairman METCALF. I thought Congressman Dellenback was going to set another precedent. But here again the seniority tradition has worked against him.

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I foresee several other things happening, for instance in the committee on insurance which I chaired this past session, we asked a full commission to bring in and investigate a series, and our public broadcasting people made available to use the equipment, so we were able to benefit from something that was already prepared by the medium. I foresee a possibility of instant replay on the floor of the house, where you have a particularly good committee report, a portion which might well be televised, and you are limited by your imagination as to how this type of thing can be used, and I do not know what the answers to these questions are, but I do see some of them coming.

One idea that I think we may well consider on a statewide basis involves the way we handle our delegation meetings in Jacksonville, where we have 14 members in our delegation, 3 senators and on several occasions prior to this session, public broadcasting making the studio available to us, to all of our delegation meetings, at which time we will have the proposition where the person can call in and, on legislation, or particular problems, and so there is some thought being given to have at least on an experimental basis some of our committee meetings of the State legislature on the statewide hookup with educational television, and ask for the same type of response.

Let me address myself to two other points, and I will hush.

We have wrestled with controls and we came out clearly in favor of letting public broadcasting do their own work. We did have a problem in choreography, because part of the way we funded this thing was through our department of education, and there was a little bit of jealousy as to how the moneys would be spent, and I think we made the message very clear to the department, that the coverage of public broadcasting would be the controlling factor.

For our costs, we are going to spend this year $355,000 to cover a 50-day session and interim committee meetings, and in addition to that, we have added $1 million to the general revenue appropriation to fund some additional equipment which, and I am sure there will be some other needs as we go along, but I believe our legislature is at this point convinced that is a worthwhile expenditure, and we control it under a joint management committee, which I gather has a very similar type of jurisdiction, as you would here, and so we funnel the operational money to public broadcasting that way, and that clearly keeps the department of education out of it, but we have worked out a détente as it relates to the use of the equipment during the period of time.

Mr. Rebman can correct me if I messed it up.

Mr. REBMAN. Not at all.

We are pleased to know the Japanese broadcasters came to see us several years ago looking toward the beginning of covering their national government, and now they are back looking toward the other dimensions we have added in that time, and we find that kind of exciting experience, working with them, and hearing their ideas of how their national assembly, comparable to our country, almost has taken us one better in the ideas we presented several years ago, and they too

are working like we are in Florida to extend the coverage beyond just a broadcast presentation to what we call two-way television, where miniature remote units are existing, and microwave interconnect neighborhoods are accomplished, so as the issues of the State progress, and appear before the public, the public has an actual interplay with the issues and work conduct.

We call it broadening our brain base from a few humble people working on a problem to several million people working on a problem, and this is very exciting to us in Florida, and evidently to the Japanese people as well.

Representative DELLENBACK. Are you indicating in that, Mr. Rebman, that the Japanese have gone to a broadcast or telecast of their national Diet.

Mr. REBMAN. Yes, sir.

Representative DELLENBACK. This is done on a regular basis?

Mr. REBMAN. Yes, sir. They are very proud of that coverage, and from what I have seen of it, it is excellent. They go beyond just coverage of debate. They do documentaries, factual presentations on the issues before the Diet, it is rather extensive and comprehensive.

Their next dimension is public involvement through telephone communications.

Representative DELLENBACK. Mr. Chairman, if I may, I would be interested in learning about the matter of editing. That is one of the questions I was going to ask, this question of editing, because I know that one of the representatives, the chairman, I am not sure which one it was, talked about editing, taking out the dull spots, and that concerned me, because editing gavel-to-gavel coverage could potentially yield an entirely different kind of a picture.

I gather also from what you said, it went from the gavel-to-gavel coverage, so that you take out the uninteresting parts.

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. I am afraid I misled you. We tape gavel to gavel. They have access to the entire proceedings for that day, but the time constraints are such in the showing that it is impossible to show 5 or 6 hours of legislative session, so what happens is that it is in fact edited, you can do as much editorializing, I realize, editing as you can do, but I do not think that many of my colleagues, in fact, I do not know any of my colleagues that feel like the editing has been unfair.

Primarily, what they have done is to pick a major issue, and then show sufficient time in the time frame that is ample to cover everything that happened on that issue of that day, so if the editing is really blotting out something that is important, if they begin to tinker, slice it up into compartments, then the thing may be different.

Representative DELLENBACK. The telecasting and broadcasting is not done live.

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. No, it is not.

Representative DELLENBACK. On this point, you differ from the Connecticut people.

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. They capsulize also. We televise everything live that we can. For instance, there was a debate in the judiciary committee that was put on at the time that we could televise it. The gavel-togavel coverage which is what we do in the city of Jacksonville for every city council meeting, and the county of Jacksonville is larger than the State of Rhode Island, it has a large rural area within it, and it has all the problems of a State.

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It is one of the larger cities in the free world, but I mentioned that earlier because the council session does appear for the total evening. We do present also at that time, not the same night, but other nights their committee meetings so people have access early to the entire government.

Interestingly enough, at 180° of the national situation we are discussing here is that situation whereby the legislative branch of government, which is incidentally patterned after the National Government, the legislative branch had such completed exposure with the issues and the people involved, before the public continually, that the executive branch came to us, and said that they felt they needed treatment the same as the legislative branch, and so we have a way of handling that. Representative DELLENBACK. You do some live broadcasting for a minute or so, but that is on a selective basis on a given issue.

Most of what you do is edited, but the editing is not within the political control of the legislature?

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. That is correct.

Representative DELLENBACK. It is within the control of the broadcasters as to what is or is not shown.

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. Yes.

Mr. REBMAN. There is another thing happening, that is, we talked about the changes that can occur in the legislative body, but I think we can look at the changes that can occur in the media, getting more accurate information on the air, and what I suggest there, we are being taped all day long, the house and the senate, taping everything that happens, and that of course allows us to seat anybody else that can use that sort of information, so that the commercial television reporters on the scene who cannot film the entire proceedings all day long, all that they have to do is sit there with timers, and they no longer have to have bodies of people interpreting second and third hand as to their newsmen that night.

We are able to present exactly what happened for the commercial broadcasters, so that we think in the year ahead particularly a real boon to coverage and commercial television.

Representative DELLENBACK. Do you find a serious problem in serving on the floor, Mr. Birchfield, with televising?

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. With the lights, I am willing to put up with that. During the course of a day you forget they are on.

Representative DELLENBACK. But they are still in that situation where it is bright, it is hot?

Mr. BIRCHFIELD. Up until this past year we were able to get enough electricity to air-condition.

I do not know if we will turn the air-conditioning off or not. With the air-conditioning we have at this point, there is no problem with heat, but from the standpoint of lights, it is disturbing initially. It is like walking out of a building, and then you readjust.

Mr. REBMAN. There again, that will be corrected. We have six new cameras that have just been delivered that are low-light level cameras, so we will be able to turn off the lights and use existing lights in the house and the senate.

Representative DELLENBACK. It is just inevitable the technology will advance, the main question is, has it advanced, and apparently it has moved to this stage.