With a healthy, unexciting breakfast, you need a zesty appetizer to start the day. I receive mine from C-SPAN, where the morning talk show, "Washington Journal," gets my partisan juices flowing. A liberal and a conservative politician pick articles from the morning paper and usually get into an argument. They spin, they bicker, they exchange barbs. I love it.

C-SPAN, two educational channels funded by the cable television industry, is known for providing "unfiltered" news—including live coverage of floor debates in the U.S. House and Senate, unabridged taping of campaign stump speeches, and similar political jousting. Yet the same network famous for providing the most partisan news is also considered the most objective. Why? Because C-SPAIN lets politics appear as it is, with all its partisan slants. Sometimes the slant is obvious, as when a Democrat or Republican states his party's position, and sometimes it is concealed behind the desire to appear "nonpolitical" (or "bipartisan"). C-SPAN tolerates both: It doesn't dismiss people's opinions merely because they are partisan, and it doesn't dismiss the aspiration to rise above partisanship merely because the effort often fails or is insincere.

Brian Lamb, the head moderator, and his able assistants do something almost never done on the major networks. They listen and they question; or rather, they listen so that they can question. Lamb's purpose is to enable the talker to make his point, not to embarrass him. But to do that, he asks for evidence, for a source, for an example, for consistency, or—when it's a wanderer—for the point. Sometimes the result is to embarrass an ill-informed caller or a biased guest, but that is not the intent. The intent-though Lamb doesn't boast of it-is to educate.

On C-SPAN talk-show programs the moderators do not simply sit by silently while others talk; they maintain an active neutrality that helps all sides. They want to improve our respect for democratic debate; so they do their best to make the debate worthy of respect. You never hear a voice-over or a sound-bite on C-SPAN. In a voice-over, the network reporter gives the gist of a speaker's statement in his own words, and then often illustrates his interpretation with a punchy phrase actually taken from the speaker. The emphasis is the reporter's, and the speaker, who may well be the President of the United States, becomes a character in the reporter's story-and thus a witness to the reporter's moral or intellectual superiority.

The ruling vice of American journalists is not that too many are Democrats but that they show such disrespect for democracy. Their error is mostly unconscious but nonetheless grave: They despise the surface of things and look too much, too quickly, for the inside story. The surface of things in democratic politics is the partisan dispute of the moment, but journalists allow themselves to get bored with that. They don't listen partly because they have heard it before and mostly because they are convinced beforehand that it doesn't mean anything. The only important events, they believe, are the ones that go on behind the scenes, and the only important words are those spoken in private: what we don't see determines what we do see, and the job of the journalist is to unearth secrets, not to report what is obvious.

C-SPAN, by contrast, is not afraid of the obvious. It adopts the citizen's point of view instead of the wise guy's. The citizen according to C-SPAN is part voter, part tourist. As a voter, a citizen needs to know what is necessary to form sensible opinions, which means he needs to hear issues and principles as well as tactics and intrigue. Scandals are displayed of course, but for what they show about accuser and accused, not for general, Zeitgeist, hot-air commentary.

With frequent shots of Washington, D.C., C-SPAN appeals to the naive tourist who both wants to learn and is favorably inclined toward the sights he visits. And C-SPAN has two school buses, actually mobile transmitters, that travel throughout the country, stopping at historical sites, museums, local newspapers, and exploring congressional districts. Viewers get to see the things Americans are proud of-their history and above all their government.

Most of the day the two C-SPAN channels broadcast proceedings of the House and Senate, with explanations but without cynical comment. C-SPAN also covers ceremonies, and stays for the whole event, with no apologies for the boring parts, which actually give spectators and viewers time to wonder and reflect. The network is there for political meetings of all kinds and tendencies, and after the session is over, the camera lingers for a minute so that we sense the difference between formal and informal, and are reminded that life is larger than TV.

C-SPAN is not mainly intellectual or entertaining, though it is both. It is deeply practical as it helps us examine the business of our common life. Its founder, Brian Lamb, is a suitably modest man who understands our democracy and has set an example of how to use the media democratically. C-SPAN airs many complaints about the media and receives a few of its own. Since more callers are conservative, for instance, the latter sometimes want to know why liberals get equal time. But if the rest of TV news were more like C-SPAN, complaints would be fewer and less justified.

Harvey Mansfield is Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard University and author of many acclaimed books on politics.