Thanks in large part to the efforts of Stephen Colbert, Arizona senator Jon Kyl endured a round of mockery after his claim about 90% of Planned Parenthood funding going for abortions. Kyl’s office explained away the assertion as not “intended to be a factual statement.” Now, Kyl’s words will not appear in the permanent version of debate before Congress, the Congressional Record. (Members of Congress have the authority  to make minor edits to their on-floor statements before the permanent Record is published.) According to the official publication of congressional proceedings and debates, Kyl actually said, “If you want an abortion you go to Planned Parenthood and that is what Planned Parenthood does.”

Whether Kyl was better served by replacing an inaccurate statement with a misleading one is unclear. And, of course, thanks to C-SPAN, future scholars will always know exactly what Kyl said. The Kyl affair, in this respect, would seem like a victory for C-SPAN.

Perhaps. But such victories have come at considerable cost. C-SPAN started broadcasting House proceedings in 1979, and the intervening three decades have witnessed a dramatic decline in the quality (and quantity) of congressional debate. With more members playing for the cameras, the purpose of Senate addresses has changed from contributing to debate to offering prepared remarks before a basically empty chamber. And what is said has less to do with public policy than with pure partisanship. This appears to be part of a broader shift in how members of Congress conceive of their jobs: in analyzing 2005-7 press releases, Harvard political scientist Gary King recently concluded that, as the Washington Post summarized, “modern members of Congress spend about 27percent of the time just taunting each other.”

Partisanship—often of a fierce variety—always has formed a central component of American political culture. But the spreading to Congress is quite new. As someone who has spent a lot of time with the Congressional Record in differing periods of the 20^th century (1913-35, 1945-89), I can’t think of any period before 1980 or so in which the Record was filled with such high levels of fact-free nonsense or partisan taunts.

So C-SPAN deserves kudos for preserving the accuracy of the historical record regarding Kyl’s comments. But in so doing, we should also acknowledge the network’s contribution to a fundamentally different—and less substantial—congressional culture.