Here is a story from ABC’s Nightline on what Reverend Billy terms ‘the holy business of saving public access’. It’s good to see the threats to access getting national attention and making an effort to detail some of the underlying causes of those threats. However, this story is also notable in that it is an example of how, once again, corporate media likes to trivialize and marginalize the full breadth and scope of community access and the wide variety of constituencies it serves, and those who create through it.

It is also notable in that it misses it’s own point in seeing the relevance and effective civic uses of access in that it features a clip of then-State Senator Barack Obama on local access, a medium of communication he obviously understood the value of. He’s not the only one. Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted used to have his own regular political talk show (which I was a guest on at one time) entitled “Political Perspectives”, which ran for a couple of years on MVCC, via a medium that Mr. Husted later voted to undercut with his support of Ohio video franchise legislation SB 117. This legislation has proven (and was predicted to be) to be highly destructive to the survival of local community access media throughout the state. What is sadly ironic is a show like his would hardly have been able to exist if such legislation had been in effect while he was taking advantage of the medium himself.

Here’s Ed Asner with some different and more supportive perspective of the importance of the role of public access.