aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Community TV: The canary in the coalmine?
The DMCA is going from bad to worse (a draft of the bill is now available). Congress is about to give away the Internet by abolishing net neutrality. And I have a special personal disappointment with the news, via Jeff Chester’s piece in The Nation, that Congress is poised to kill community TV:
Congress is about to strike a blow that would eliminate the last remaining policy insuring local oversight of communications companies. A GOP-led effort on behalf of the telephone lobby (principally Verizon and AT&T), also backed by many Democrats, is about to toss in the dustbin the longstanding policy enabling cities or counties to negotiate a “franchise” agreement with companies that provide cable TV service. A key House committee is poised to pass legislation that would strip away the rights of communities to have any say in how phone and cable networks serve them in the digital era. [...]
Little has been written in the mainstream press about what the potential loss of cable franchising will mean. More than thirty years ago in The Nation, Ralph Lee Smith wrote the visionary “The Wired Nation.” Even back then, activists recognized cable TV’s ability to serve as a “community communications” system (they even used the word “broadband” back then). Cable was supposed to be an alternative to mainstream commercial television. There would be many local channels, addressing the needs of education, civic participation, free speech and the arts. Cable systems and programming channels would be owned and operated by people of color, potentially ameliorating what was--and still is--a communications industry dominated by white males and largely programmed to their interests. The cable lobby adopted much of this rhetoric as companies vied to secure lucrative deals with cities. We will be your “community medium,” they declared, promising to deliver PEG and an endless array of local services. But once these giants, whose successors today include companies such as Time Warner and Comcast, won the franchise, they used their political power--at City Hall and in Washington, DC--to break most of their promises. The cable lobby assembled a powerful political machine, including key Democratic leaders, and was able to win national legislation in 1984 that largely freed them to operate as national programming services.
I left Public Access Television as a career in 1999. I watch podcasting and vlogging develop today through the lense of that experience. I see precisely the dynamic - the energy, the creativity, the hope and optimism, the promise and potential - that I saw in the early 80s as I began my career in community media.
I see, too, that the “powerful political machine” built by the telecom giants is stronger than ever, and operating in a DC environment even more susceptible to its influence. I like to think that because the technology has gotten cheaper and easier to use, and because the architecture of the internet (as it stands today), there’s some hope that this technology of choice may survive and thrive.
Chester concludes:
It’s time for progressives to take a stand against the broadband banditry of Congress and the cable-telecom cartel. Any Internet-era telecommunications legislation should insure local control, provide low-income Americans with residential Internet service, protect online privacy, and keep the Internet open and free from the control of big cable and phone companies. Such legislation should also help develop a noncommercial digital commons designed to promote civil society (as opposed to the madcap commercialism that will run rampant on the broadband networks). In that way, we can honor the vision--and the political work--of activists in decades past who strove for a democratically run “community communications” system.
I certainly agree. I’m just not seeing how we get from here to there. The death of Community Television looks to me to be an inevitability. And hardly a good omen.
