Good article in the Illinois Times on some of the serious challenges public access is being confronted with these days. There are those who say access has had its day, is an outdated model of communication, YouTube is replacing it, etc..etc… (points raised in this PBS report on Public Access TV Fights for Relevance in the YouTube Age). Never mind the crux of the issue is replacing non-commercial, public spheres of communication with privately owned and controlled ones (which is what sites like Google Video and YouTube are). Access to communication is never outdated, and the right to do it should include via what is currently the predominate means of media in our society and that is, like it or not, television.

But anecdotal evidence — and in the non-Nielsen-ized world of cable access, that’s the only kind available — suggests that Just Two Guys is one of Access 4’s “hit” shows. Anderson and Roderick’s blog (just-two-guys.blogspot.com) gets up to 100 hits per day, and the hosts find themselves getting recognized by everyone from the stocker at Lowe’s hardware to the cashier at the thrift store where they buy the coolly retro jackets they wear on their show. They’ve even been profiled by the State Journal-Register.

As their show has grown, though, Anderson has noticed that the resources available to do Just Two Guys seem to have declined. The full-time director who helped them fulfill their artistic visions, whether it meant filming outside the studio or adding a laugh-track, has been transferred away. Another director got laid off; neither position has been replaced. With only part-time staff working at the studio, shooting times have become harder to schedule, and editing help has dwindled. “I think the model they’re moving toward is just a space to do the show and the cameras and nothing else,” Anderson says.

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Nationwide, public access television is becoming ever less publicly accessible. In parts of Indiana and Michigan, cable providers like Comcast are closing studios and permanently pulling the plug; in Chicago, behemoth provider AT&T is introducing the spiffy new service U-verse, offering a tantalizing array of bells and whistles while exiling all public access programming to broadcast Siberia.

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To understand why PEGs are disappearing, you must first get a grasp on why they exist. Contrary to popular belief, such channels weren’t invented just to give fringe voices like The Shooting Sport host Tom Shafer a home.

The concept of PEG programming dates back decades to the birth of broadcasting, when Congress recognized that the airwaves are public property. Just as the far left end of the radio dial is reserved for non-commercial and community radio (like our WQNA 88.3 FM), so too is a certain segment of the television band dedicated to publicly-accessible free use. In Springfield, for example, the municipal channel has long been used to provide training courses for the fire department. Even now, a training course required for firefighters is shown on channel 18 every Monday at 9 a.m. and 1 and 7 p.m., so that each shift can watch. Channel 18 also broadcasts city council committee meetings, programs promoting tourism and historical information, and special events like the mayor’s inauguration.

With cable television, the public property is even more “real” or concrete than with radio: the wires that bring commercial channels like ESPN and QVC into our homes are laid in the public right-of-way along our city streets. In exchange for providing this privilege to cable companies, municipalities typically demand certain perks, such as free cable service for schools, libraries and fire stations (there are about 80 such “drops” in Springfield), along with a few spots on the dial for PEG programming. Because municipalities have such different needs, franchise agreements specifying exactly what a cable company should provide have traditionally been negotiated on a city-by-city basis.

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Does anybody care? It’s impossible to tell, since PEG channels, by definition, don’t sell advertising and aren’t included in Nielsen surveys. But Erik Mollberg, chair of the Alliance for Community Media in Indiana, has a survey by the local Comcast franchise to prove the appeal of the PEG channel he helps manage, Access Fort Wayne. The survey asked subscribers which channel they would be willing to delete, and only 1 percent of respondents were willing to lose a PEG channel.

“They’re not going to watch it all the time,” he admits, “but by God, they want to watch the city council meeting and our international hockey team.”

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“To me, it’s almost a higher purpose,” Crowdson says. “Maybe not with every show, but with a lot of them, you really get the sense you’re helping the community out. It’s not just business; it’s a community.”

Read The Complete Article

Good questions and salient points from Bruce Kushnick of the New Network Institute…

What now for broadband and the telecoms?

Will Obama and Congress be satisfied to leave the U.S. as 15th among developed nations in broadband use? Will the FCC under Democratic control be less of a tool for large corporations?

Questions for Obama and Congress:

Q. Will you set the goal of broadband access at 1 gigabit in every American home?

Q. Why aren’t telecom subsidies being directed to cover much-needed infrastructure improvements?

Q. What steps should be taken to democratize the FCC’s decision-making process?

Q. Will you re-introduce and implement the parts of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that promote competition?

Is it time to break up AT&T again? And Verizon, as well?

Telecommunications reform needs to be on President-elect Obama’s agenda and that of the 111th Congress. It is a key aspect of overall infrastructure renewal and will impact the future of the nation’s economic prosperity, educational system and its role in an increasingly globalized world.

January 1, 2008, marks the 25th anniversary of the breakup of the old AT&T after a successful Department of Justice antitrust suit during the Reagan administration. AT&T was broken up because a then-upstart, MCI, wanted to compete to offer long distance service and AT&T did everything in its power to block competition. The case, initiated by the Ford Administration and pursued under Jimmy Carter, showed how the government could help foster fair competition in the telecommunications industry. But thanks to deregulation in the 1990s, we now live in an age of mega-telecoms, including a reconstituted AT&T.

The results have been damaging to Americans’ and widely ignored by the traditional news media. The U.S. share of worldwide Internet traffic has shrunk over the last decade from 70 percent to 25 percent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranks the U.S. 15th out of 30 leading industrial nations in per capita broadband use. And Americans are getting poorer broadband telecommunications services-lower bandwidth-and paying more than citizens in most other advanced industrial countries.

Go Here to read the rest of this article

Wow. Another revelatory insight from John McCain.

“There is [sic] too many ways…that people are able to communicate with one another.”

Sascha Meinrath sums up the ramifications of this mindset pretty well.

Some will certainly say that McCain’s statements are just about our enemies having too many ways to communicate. Ponder that spin for a moment — how do you limit the abilities of your enemies to communicate without detrimentally impacting your non-enemies? Put into a different context, McCain’s quote is exactly what repressive regimes around the globe have stated throughout history. It’s a statement with woeful historical and contemporary precedent.

Read Meinrath’s full blog posting on this Here

While we’re on the subject of John McCain, this is an interesting expose’ on his history with a much more revealing portrait of his true character. You sure you think this guy should be President? Read this article about our ‘make-believe maverick’ and let us know what you think.

An excellent posting by Candace Clement of Free Press about what public access is and wrecking being inflicted on it by the destructive nature of AT&T’s legislative onslaught with statewide video franchising and their U-Verse video system.

Read The Complete Post Here

Recommended essay by John Kelley. Just a few points from it….

I finally got out of town, went to Austin for the weekend to see brother writer Joe Bageant, author of “Dear Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War”. I also went to the first media summit in Texas to take a look at the fairly sorry state of community media in Texas. Somehow both fit together.

Brother Joe now lives in Belize most of the time, writing in a small village on the coast a three hour bus ride from Belize City. He was in Austin reading at St. Edwards University and at the Austin Writers League. Joe is quickly climbing into that small class of great storytellers that can drop you in the world of the great, invisible, American working class. He reveals the indignities suffered when you live on the economic edge and the courage needed to face life in a world where bombing people in foreign lands for oil takes a higher priority then providing basic health care and education. It’s the real story of many people, you see them everyday, but you just avoid the question of what life is really like in their America, a condition that looks sure to spread.

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In the meantime we float along in a virtual world wrapped in advertising symbols so disconnected from the world of nature and each other we don’t even know what it does to us. The product of learned helplessness, the ultimate in advertising, resistance is futile. If we don’t even comprehend what it does to us, what does that mean for the invisible working class person we see every day let alone some poor starving child of a rape in Darfur? All unknowingly sharing a common fate.

We have to admit it, every American, some more then others, participate in war crimes and human exploitation. Cheap stuff seduces us from looking at the slave labor it takes to have “low, low prices”. What we do get out of this, is a cheapening of life, including our own. Landscapes of corporate plastic ticky tack stores, someone once said, deposited on any high traffic urban strip in America not knowing where you are there would be no clues because the all are the same. It’s a Wal-Mart world.

To make it run right you have to feed people a steady diet of distractive mind mush, so much the better if panders to their most basic instincts. It’s the stuff that softens your head for the real message the advertising. We react like Pavlov’s dogs going deeper into debt in order to keep the great consumer economy of unneeded crap fed and the rich can get richer? Only problem is we are running out of resources to buy and credit to buy it with.

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Much of the independent and community media is caught up in its technology prejudice for the quick, easy and showy forms of video. It creates a cultural divide with working folks…..

To be real community media that can influence social and political change you must look at a multiplatform model. What model reaches the people in your area that you want to get the message?

Read The Full Article

Michael Winship, senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, provides this commentary analysis regarding what went down at the recent political conventions in Denver and St. Paul, and why a new and dangerous line may have been crossed in all of this.

In both cities, getting tickets to the big shindigs hosted by major corporations seeking to bend the ear of party VIP’s was a media challenge - they were blocked by sometimes heavy-handed attempts by police and private security to keep the press out. A very few, like ABC News’ Brian Ross got in, recording, for example, the bash thrown for Republicans by Lockheed Martin, the American Trucking Association and the NRA, featuring a band named Hookers and Blow. However, in Denver, one of Ross’ producers, Asa Eslocker, was arrested while trying to interview Democratic senators and donors leaving a private event at the Brown Palace Hotel.

What was different in St. Paul was that the police seemed especially intent on singling out independent journalists and activists covering the Republican convention for the Internet and other alternative forms of media. Over the weekend, police staged preemptive raids on several buildings where planning sessions for demonstrations were being held, one of them a meeting of various video bloggers, including I-Witness Video, a media group that monitors law enforcement. Later in the week, I-Witness’ temporary headquarters were entered by police, claiming they had received news of a possible hostage situation.

Why all this interest? One can only speculate, but footage that I-Witness shot at the Republican convention four years ago in Manhattan has helped exonerate hundreds who were arrested and detained by the New York Police Department, their cases either dismissed or resulting in acquittals at trial.

Read The Full Report

Matt Stoller weighs in Here on the inane comments my FCC Commissioner McDowell and does a good job in unveiling the politics behind McCain’s policy initiatives towards the future of the internet. Whatever one thinks of the merits of either of the dominant party candidates for president, people who care at all about the internet continuing to exist in a fashion we are familiar with should be made aware of the stark choice between the effects of an Obama administration vs. a McCain administration would have in regards to that future.

Google is one of the strongest proponents of net neutrality, and there’s no way in hell that company would support a policy that placed content regulations on their business. But who is actually censoring our communications networks? Verizon, for one, which refused to allow a text message from NARAL to be sent to their members, citing its ‘unsavory’ and controversial nature. AT&T, for another, which censored a web-casted Pearl Jam concert when the lead singer shouted out anti-Bush statements. And Comcast, which not only was caught illegally blocking file sharing by its customers, but has a history of blocking political ads on its cable service that criticize politicians company executives have given money to.

And lo and behold, these are the same companies that are seeking a McCain Presidency, as Amanda Terkel notes in her piece on McCain’s tech policy.

The current campaign cycle is also shaping up to be lucrative. U.S. Telecom Association president and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr., Sprint CEO Daniel R. Hesse, and Verizon chairman and CEO Ivan G. Seidenberg have each raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for McCain’s campaign. AT&T executive vice president for federal relations Timothy McKone has raised at least $500,000.

Add to that list the Alison H. McSlarrow and Kyle E. McSlarrow, both of whom work for cable and telecom interests and both of whom have raised more than $50k for McCain.

What’s really going on is that this week or next, McCain is going to release his technology policy, and he’s looking for cover from business allies, as his policy was written by the telecom lobbyists running his campaign and libertarian Michael Powell, who used his FCC position to garner lucrative business opportunities within the tech and telecom worlds. McCain will talk - just as Bush did in 2004 when he called for universal broadband by 2007 - about how every American needs broadband, but his plan - just like Bush’s - will do nothing to achieve it. What his plan will do is eviscerate consumer protections on the internet, allowing for censorship by private interests like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T who have already demonstrated that they have and will engage in censorship of political speech for business and political reasons.

That’s what is going on here, and FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell is the point person in the propaganda campaign. Now, the question is not substantive, it’s whether this campaign will work to persuade people that up is down, that black is white. I don’t think it will.

I hope not. Read the complete post Here

I have to wonder if FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell is actually trying to raise a red herring here regarding net neutrality, or if he is simply so drunk on the market society kool aid that he is simply incapable of understanding the full scope of what he is saying, and the depth of fallacy regarding his concern about ‘government’ censorship’ of the internet?

Either way this is completely irresponsible.

“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”

“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

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A recent study by the Media Research Center’s Culture & Media Institute argues that the three main points in support of the Fairness Doctrine – scarcity of the media, corporate censorship of liberal viewpoints, and public interest – are myths.

About that ’study’, a colleague of mine from the Alliance for Community Media weighed in with this…

As an adjunct to this, the “study” referred is either a joke (as in hilarious) or a joke (as in so slanted as to be ridiculous.) Or both.

As just one example of many, you may be surprised to learn that:

* Major liberal-leaning sources of news and opinion reach a far greater audience than conservative-leaning sources. Audience reach and circulation statistics illustrate the liberal domination of the five major information media, two of which have no conservative sources:

* Broadcast TV news, millions/day: Liberal 42.1, Conservative 0
* Top 25 newspapers, millions/day: Liberal 11.7, Conservative 1.3
* Cable TV news, millions/month: Liberal 182.8, Conservative 61.6
* Top talk radio, millions/week: Liberal 24.5, Conservative 87.0
* Newsweeklies, millions/week: Liberal 8.5, Conservative 0

Actually, I have no idea of what they hell they’re talking about here. But it does show the value of having studies to back up your claims. This study is cited in the article without any assessment of its validity. It’s assumed to be valid even though it’s obviously a pile of steaming horse poop.

Josh Stearns of Free Press comments on this as well with his excellent blog posting McDowell’s Scare Tactics Reach New Low

Chris Hedges writing for Truthdig takes on the prevailing notion that newspapers and journalism are suffering because of the inability to effectively transform themselves to new technologies. The culprit, it seems, is a much more ubiquitous and relentless factor; the rise and domination of the Corporate State.

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

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The rise of our corporate state has done the most, however, to decimate traditional news-gathering. Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., General Electric and Viacom control nearly everything we read, watch, hear and ultimately think. And news that does not make a profit, as well as divert viewers from civic participation and challenging the status quo, is not worth pursuing. This is why the networks have shut down their foreign bureaus. This is why cable newscasts, with their chatty anchors, all look and sound like the “Today” show. This is why the FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox’s celebrity gossip program “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “700 Club” as “bona fide newscasts.” This is why television news personalities, people like Katie Couric, have become celebrities earning, in her case, $15 million a year. This is why newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are being ruthlessly cannibalized by corporate trolls like Sam Zell, turned into empty husks that focus increasingly on boutique journalism. Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions. They prefer to close the prying eyes of reporters. They prefer to transform news into another form of mindless amusement and entertainment.

Read The Full Article

It would be a tragic loss to civil society to lose Public, educational and governmental (”PEG”) access programming on cable systems. [“Unscripted Ending”] . The programming will never have network production values, nor should it, to remain accessible and affordable, yet it is rich in local content typically overlooked by slick news channels who thrive on tragedies and advertising. After the Cable lobby buffaloed Congress to effectively end rate and channel regulation in the l984, PEG access is left as the one way to have value returned out of cable’s monopoly rates; where it is a rugged outpost of vigorous public speech. Yes programs can be wild and crazy. Those who want pabulum can get hundreds of channels of it in the vast wasteland.

So long as most people get their news on TV, Internet sites are a poor substitute for PEG access. Contrary to the implication of the article, switching from local to state franchising does not preclude requirement of local PEG channels and services. Vermont switched in the 1970s and has over 20 vigorous local access operations authorized by State statute and overseen under Public Service Board Regulation.

The real agenda of Cable operators is not better regulation. Most neither like nor understand PEG access. The prefer an outdated model to buy programming and cram it down the wire. Most have vivid records of hostility to access requirements and lousy treatment of PEG operations. Beware any monopolist who whines about a “level playing field”– That’s a game the public will not win.

Samuel Press
Burlington VT 05401

The author was the Vermont Public Advocate in the 1980s and represented several local PEG channels.