night on the communicators, outgoing chair talks about his three-year tenure as head of the commission. the issue ccabout facing the trump administration. should dialthat you back the fdc and give a lot of the responsibility to the ftc is something the networks have been dealing with for years. before i joined, there was an article in the washington post that said, in essence, here is how the networks tend -- in 10 to got the fcc. it would be tragic of that happened. announcer: watch "the --municators" sunday night monday night at 8:00 p.m. on

c-span2. >> we are standing on the grounds of the pennsylvania state capitol in harrisburg. we will learn about the pcn cable network and how it gives pennsylvanians a look into their state government. >> we are at the pennsylvania cable network. we are near harrisburg, pennsylvania. we are the c-span for pennsylvania. we are on in 3.3 million homes in has obeying you. every cable station carries us. verizon fio's carries us. every time he house and senate is in session, we have them online. we carry hearings in press conferences, the supreme court of pennsylvania is on pcn. we have call-in programs. basically all the ideas for c-span we stole here. this network was started in 1979.

the people who started were some of the people who founded some of the earliest cable systems in the 1950's. they had all done well in business and they wanted to give something back. so they created this network as a public service to give college credit for cable. but, the woman who was running pcn at the time, she was a c-span fan and wanted to turn it into a c-span for pennsylvania. we talked for about six months about what a state version of c-span could be. and so i came here and put in place all of the things that brian had been doing at c-span. in state capitals, state capitol newsrooms have been shrinking dramatically over the years. it's half the size it was when we started doing pcn. it is still diminishing. reporters are being downsized, newspapers are dropping capital bureau reporters.

if we weren't covering the state government, people would have no idea what the state government is doing. we are funded the same way as c-span. we get our money from the cable companies who carry our programming. most are covered by the legislature. that is challenging in other ways. we have editorial independence. our editorial department decides what to cover. when to cover in and when to air it. we can get calls from powerful legislatures urging us to do something. we don't have to follow their bidding. the challenge is we have to provide a product they think has value to subscribers. we have added a lot of programming elements that appeal to different groups of pennsylvanians. they all have something in common. they are all about pennsylvania. they are c-span style. we have to keep our costs of production per hour as low as possible. there are things you can't find an cable anywhere else.

everybody else in television, every channel you come to has more money than we have. we can't compete with them head-to-head. we have to offer things you can't get. we put together a format of programming that has a lot of different genres that appeal to small groups of people. on july 1, 2, 3, the anniversary of gettysburg. the national park service rangers do walking tours of the battlefields. they are two hours long. we just take a camera down there and clip a wireless microphone on the ranger and follow them around. we show it that night unedited. no television channel in their right mind would do that.

it doesn't appeal to a mass audience. it appeals intensely to a small group of people. but they will be fanatically loyal to pcn and cable because of that. they may never watches the rest of the year but because of that program, they will be loyal to us. days, they love us. there are other things we do in january. we cover the state farm show. it is indoors in january. we walk around and find a teenager who is grooming a goat for the 4-h competition. we say, tell us about your goat. why do you do this? we cover the square dance competition and the cake judging and the quilt judging. we have a fanatical following for our farm show. the people who watch gettysburg might not watch the farm show. that is a luxury that we have that we don't have to appeal to nielsen ratings.

>> it's on a statewide level. the legislative process. one of the things i feel good there are a lot of the guests are willing to come on pcn that might be skeptical of other outlets. it's not about our host or personality. it's about being the conduit to give our guests and the opportunity to talk about their initiatives and policies. and so we meet on a regular basis to talk about what's going on in the legislature. what kind of hot topics are on the news. we have a hot chat about who is the best to represent persons on a particular issue. this assignment board, we use a sharedr-based web format. 20 years ago with

this old-fashioned dry erase board. some of us have become emotionally attached. it is easy to look at the board. for instance, next wednesday there is a list of all the events we are aware of right now. we also have bureaus in the lid lpa and his bird. the additional events they have, i will show you. this will show you a quick rundown of what the events are and what people are assigned to cover. we can say who is the capital, who is at a certain location. we can sort of shift our staff around as we need to based on where people might be at that day. one of the main goals that we do is shed daylight on what the legislature is doing. so, i always think -- i have a grandmother who lived to be 88-years-old. i want to make sure that people like that know what's going on

with their elected officials and what decisions are being made and what's being done with our money. whenever we talk about the different issues are the different bills being considered, i keep people like that in mind. your average, every day, pennsylvania's citizen and how issues are going to affect them. pcn is in a unique situation. we are funded by the cable system. we don't receive money. that is a big misconception. we do not receive any state or federal money. there is no influence. we have good relationships with the people who are legislative leaders. there is never any influence in determining what we cover based on where the money is coming from. we are in the operations department here. >> we are the operations department here at pcn. my name is deborah sheppard and i am the chief operating officer here at pcn. inside here is master control. this is the heart of the network.

all the signals come in here. the master control operator who is working in this room which is usually four or five hours a day. there is a lot of rotation of staff coming in and out. they have to be very detail-oriented and highly trained in this room because whatever happens in this room is going to occur on the air. signals come in. they can be the house, the senate, someone from the governors of office, it can be a football game. the signals come in here and the master control operator here, his responsibility is to put up the graphics on the air. locations, the topic. making sure everything is up at the right time. the name is correct with the individual, things like that. now we are going to go into another room. this is what we call the tape room. it's a vintage name. most of our programming is not

taped anymore, but we still call it that anyway. all of the signals that come into this room are monitored by operations staff. besides all the television we need to monitor, we also stream our signal. in this room, that's one of the responsibilities of the staff. for example, we make sure we monitor our website. we monitor our app, our mobile app. in this case it's on a tablet. we have a pcn select mobile app. it's one of our subscription services. you can view the mobile app on a phone or a tablet. you can view it on a computer. >> i think a lot more of our

programming will be delivered online. cable is still our bread and butter. it is our main source of distribution for the foreseeable future. but we also have to realize that more people are interested in mobile devices. there are places in rural pennsylvania where we have to make ourselves available. doing what we're doing, we have a programming format that appeals to a lot of people. reputable surveys have shown that 38% of the potential audience watches us at least once a month. those are remarkable numbers. even for commercial channels. we have a format that appeals to people. we are financially sound. we have good support for me cable companies. so, knock on wood we can keep it going. announcer: this weekend, we are featuring the history of harrisburg, pennsylvania.

learn more about harrisburg and cities tour on our at www.c-span.org/citytour. you're watching american history tv on c-span three. announcer: on lectures in history, michigan state university professor naoko wake teaches a class on the field of psychiatry in the mid-20th century. she talks about emerging theories and treatments for mental illness, and also describes how soldiers suffering from injuries faced difficulties reintegrating into society, and how gender norms change due to women's contributions to the war effort. her class is just under one hour. professor wake: i think i'm going to start our class today, h