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Question of the day
Wednesday, Apr 18, 2007 CAN-TV is sending a group down to Springfield this week to lobby against a proposal that would allow AT&T to get into the cable business. And that got me to thinking, do you believe that cable companies and phone companies which seek to provide cable-like services ought to be forced to fund community access programming and provide spaces on their service for the channels? Bonus questions: Do you watch community access TV, and if so, do you have a favorite program?
- Posted by Rich Miller
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- Levois - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 9:28 am:
I don’t have a problem with it. I think there should be avenues with which a citizen can create their own TV programs in anything about politics to comedy.
BTW, if I watch cable access it’s to watch the live call in shows. Most of them talk about politics but there are other issues to be discussed too such as health, entertainment and such. And they’re usually on Sat. and Sun mornings at 10:30 AM.
- Way Northsider - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 9:32 am:
Yes. It allows residents to easily keep abreast of what is going on in their local municipal government. It always amazes me how many people follow zoning board and village board meetings. This is really a huge help to making democracy work.
- Think Global not Local - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 9:44 am:
if the cable companies are using the public access channels as their selling point, they are going to lose the PR war. Maybe they should include the Shopping channels also.
The internet with Youtube video feeds are the new pubic access of today. Cable is so non global centric.
- pickles!! - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 10:37 am:
This whole House Bill 1500 thing has been big talk in the ‘burbs. The fact that AT&T wants to use eminent Domain by talking rights of way from municpalites to install thse big cabinets in front of homes and businesses is irking local mayor and boards.
It all comes down to competition, and AT&T is trying to change the law to allow themsleves to co compete with Comcast, and take away local control of cable tv and internet serivces. I have no problem with competiton, which would (maybe) lower rates, but there strongarming to many peopel with HB1500.
- zatoichi - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 10:43 am:
Local cable’s public access consists of the school lunch menu and scheduled sports for the next week along with several local event notices. Real local competition with would be a good thing if all the phone companies got into it. Dish and other satellites really sucking up the business around us.
- Squideshi - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 10:45 am:
If they are awarded the exclusive right to provide a certain type of infrastrcuture via a franchise agreement (contract) with a municipality, they should be required to provide any type of services that the municipality demands within the contract. If municipalies aren’t asking for public access, including the studios and equipment available to citizens, they aren’t bargining very well on behalf of their constituents.
- Just Two Guys - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 10:57 am:
Rich-
Yes, absolutely cable companies put money into public access. If they are establishing themselves as a provider to the people, they should also provide the people an outlet. I’m a firm believer in Public Access. Having a voice is one of the most important freedoms average people have. Yes, Public Access has a lot of crazies, but it can also be a very important tool for community education, community outreach, advocacy, and even entertainment.
The point of Public Access is to give people a voice. I understand that the internet is changing the way people can voice their opinions (Youtube, blogs, etc.), but I also think its important that people have a local voice. A local outlet for expression. Giving money back (a relatively small amount) to fund Public Access should be a priority for any cable company.
As for my favorite show on Public Access, well that would have to be “Just Two Guys.”
- John Lee Pettimore - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 12:01 pm:
When he brought up the issue of competition, “pickles!!” was on the right track but heading in the wrong direction. The cable companies do not want AT&T to get statewide franchise solely because they don’t want competition. It’s not about “community access” to the likes of Comcast, it about their “comcastic” profits and their “comcastic” monopoly.
And the muncipalities! Don’t get me started! They are the worst shake down artists out there! Have you ever seen what some of them require for their franchise? Planter boxes, free cable, coverage of their boring town meetings where they can be the star.
I want AT&T because I want CHOICES! That’s what competition is folks!
- amy - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 12:05 pm:
cable access…yes! and, more people should learn
how to produce television so we can get more
voices in the video mix. I know he’s a pol, but
anytime you can see Sen. Cullerton on tv, he’s
pretty interesting.
- Greg - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 12:24 pm:
No more than we should force you to use bandwidth on this site for public access.
- Just Observing - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 12:48 pm:
I watch Frank Avila’s show — he has a lot of elected officials on his show, both prominent politicians, but also candidates for office that aren’t receiving traditional media coverage.
- P - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 12:54 pm:
Cookin Wit’ Tiddle!!! and a little Chick-A-Go-Go never hurt nobody …
- fedup dem - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 1:57 pm:
Any legislator who supports HR 1500 as it was introduced should be nailed to an AT & T telephone pole and left there to rot! If you think campaign costs are obscenely high now, imagine what they would be if candidates didn’t have public access television as a potential tool for their campaigns to use.
- JimMc - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 2:11 pm:
Absolutely they should fund it.
As for favorites, Public Affairs (Jeff Berkowitz) is essential. And for pure entertainment, you cna’t beat a Cook County Board meeting. Well, at least in the John Stroger days you couldn’t.
- Guy Montag - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 2:47 pm:
I’m a fan of competition in the cable marketplace, but that’s mainly based upon the fact that I’m a cheapskate and could barter with either company for the best rate. Most of the time, I could go without public access, but I have found some late-night weekend joy on public channels in Springfield. I don’t know the name of the show, but it’s basically a couple of guys playing guitar and keyboard in a basement somewhere. It’s either cutting edge music that I haven’t learned how to appreciate, or it’s just the clangy, off-key wannabe death-metal I currently take it for.
Either way, the comedic value can’t be put into numbers on a cable bill.
- Disgusted - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 5:37 pm:
I don’t think public access is the question to answer here. The real one for Springfield, for instance, is why Insight is advertising their new phone service and touting all that they offer via cable when they’ve just sold the cable business here to Comcast, which has hundreds of complain pages on the Web about them. The first company that provides a la carte service for cable will get my money.
- Waynes World - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 6:28 pm:
Public Access TV in Chicago is great, you have Munir Muhhamad who does a pro Muslim/pro Minister Farrakhan TV show that has all the major players in Chicago coming on as guests
Jeff Berkowitz one of the best interviewers in the State as far as State Issues go.
Boyze Edwards and Dr. Kofie Malik who do live shows on weekends at CANTV They have great music, dress in 1970’s African Garb and talk about the “MAN” alot.
Frank Avila who’s shows range from local politics to the Irish Republican Army and Tibet Monks talking about Tantra Sex (It’s on Google video)
Some guy in Rogers Park who does interviews with Jewish politicians from his Rec Room, I think Senator Cullerton and a few State Pols sometimes submit shows that are broadcast on CAN TV.
Morgan Carter “The Conservation Starter” who has also done shows on WVON radio and also Radio personality LaDonna Tittle who was an ICON on black radio in the 1960’s and 1970’s does a cooking show on CAN TV
Party on, Garth. Excellent!
- Weird AL UHF - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 9:08 pm:
The access channels are more important than they are given credit for. Moreso now than ever, as media conglomerates swallow up more and more channels until less than a handful of companies own or control all the free programing in the country.
Public Access is a requirement that needs to stay and if anything, grow, because it is the only real local broadcasting going on anymore. The local network affiliate broadcast stations don’t make local shows at all anymore: the only live stuff is less than 45 minutes of news from three showings per day, and most of that is canned and re-hashed stuff as well. Every day, those stations look for ways to do less and less work for their advertising dollar, reducing staff, automating the studio and physical plant, using taped informercials and syndicated taped shows to fill the air time with commercial spots. Then they make a big deal out of covering elections for a couple hours once a year, like they’ve done us a favor, instead of something that is expected of them in exchange for use of the public airwaves.
Yes, the quality of Access porgramming is often very hit and miss, much like college radio stations but in a world owned by Clear Channel robot radio, this is where the alternative voices are now. The local voices. YOUR voice.
Your city or municipality is supposed to have a requirement in their cable contract for public access, including a studio with a nominal amount of pooled equipment that any citizen viewer can access to make and distribute their message. Usually the cable company gives a certain amount of money to a local university or community college or vocatonal school, which hosts the studio as an academic lab, and runs the training programs for people interested in making local videos. How to use the cameras and mics, how to edit, etc. What usually happens is this amount donated for the operation is too low to pay for maintenance or replacement of the gear when it wears out or gets broken, so the capability of the facility degrades over time, and the bulk of the money goes into paying for part-time operating staff for the unit, even as worn out gear makes it harder to make a product. The good news is that modern cameras and editing equipment are better yet cheaper than ever before, so it would not take a huge increase in the annual budget to deliver a viewing experience to the local community on Access that looks as good as any private sector for-profit TV channel. And this is a good and necessary thing to have in every community.
You actually get several channels in a Public Access deal: a bulletin board channel that is just a rotating slide show of local announcements, current events and schedules, not Emmy-winning stuff, but useful to the community, particularly those folks without web access or a newspaper subscription. (Public access channels are always on the cheapest-tier basic cable service, watchable by all. More than half of all TV viewers, closer to two thirds, get their signal via cable now instead of an antenna, due to poor broadcast reception, so for those people, basic cable is the difference between any television reception or none at all).
The second channel you get is the municipal channel, which lets you watch every city council meeting. This is vital for an informed electorate, as unglamorous as it is. By looping the recording of each meeting and playing it at different times of the day, it lets everyone see the goings-on regardless of their work and home schedules. I’ll wager wonks like the people that visit here tend to watch more of that coverage than they’ll admit. It’s also good for the elected officials to know their every public meeting is being recorded for posterity, so there can be no doubt about the record later, should a question or complaint arise. This is all a Good Thing.
That municipal channel usually shares time slots with the actual locally-produced programming. You get a little of everything there: bible-thumping preachers, certifiable whack-jobs with black-helicopter theories, etc. …but you also get arts: poetry, plays, painting, photography, lots of music performances in many genres and styles, some pretty good local talent at times (Rich, if your brother doesn’t do some access shows, he should). You get political shows, health shows, documentaries about a great variety of subjects, local history and local color: all the things, in fact, commercial television was SUPPOSED to give us, but has pretty much abandoned to PBS and Local Access to provide now. YOU get to make it yourself. You fill out a request for access time, you take a short familiarization course so you can operate the gear without breaking it, and they help you thru the production process to make abd show your show. Nobody can tell you no; if you want to get a message out to the people, you have a right and this gives you the means.
We NEED this, to express ourselves, to inform ourseles, to communicate, to reach out and be a community instead of just aggregated consumers who provide eyeballs for advertisiers. This is the least the cable companies and phone companies can do when they come calling for the chance to tap into our business for years at a time with very little if any competition. DO NOT allow them to blow off the requirements for access programming and production support. MANDATE it, at a practical leve, believe me, they can afford it, it’s peanuts to them.
But vital for US.
- I watch it, it's hilarious - Wednesday, Apr 18, 07 @ 10:47 pm:
In Springfield, the university used to run the access, but gave it up for cost reasons so Insight runs it in their own studios now. Have not noticed any improvement in quality. The cameras covering the city meetings are very blurry and low-rez, and the audio is muddy. But I’m glad to have the service: when we were interested in a couple city issues but had to stay home because of the kids or weather or something, it was nice to be able to watch from home. The paper barely covers those meetings at all, and never in the kind of detail we want, so the unfiltered coverage is appreciated.
As to favorite shows, well, I like some of the poetry and music programs, and the semi-crazy guys are funnier than anything on the broadcast “reality” shows. There’s a guy with a show about how to stop smoking, but he never talks about that, he just wades thru various papers and notes blathering some jeremiads about conspiracies in the city government against him. There’s the local pirate radio station owner, a very militant anti-white racist, who brings his kids on to sing songs about Whitey getting his dues. No lie. There is Tom Shaeffer the gun lobbyist, with his show “The Shooting Sport”. There used to be a young Rush wannbee named Dan Bull who also had a show. We used to joke about combining the shows into one and calling it “Shooting the Bull”.
Then there are more serious shows. The B’Hais have a talk show. There’s a couple of health related shows. Sometimes they run the Illinois Channel coverage of major state events, but the schedule is hard to keep up with. When NASA is going to launch a shuttle or rocket, they will put the live NASA-TV feed on there, and the kids and I get to watch long as we want, without commercials or cutting away after ten seconds of coverage like the commercial channels do. My kids were in a school drama show, and the local school put it on the access channel for education topics, that was fun for the whole family to watch.
Is it the first thing I go to when I hit the clicker? Rarely. But I’m glad it’s there.
Pingback Community Media: Selected Clippings - 04/18/07 « Clippings for PEG Access Television - Thursday, Apr 19, 07 @ 2:58 am:
[…] And that got me to thinking, do you believe that cable companies and phone companies which seek to provide cable-like services ought to be forced to fund community access programming and provide spaces on their service for the channels? Bonus questions: Do you watch community access TV, and if so, do you have a favorite program?  —> http://thecapitolfaxblog.com/2007/04/18/question-of-the-day-297/ ~ […]
- Frank Booth - Thursday, Apr 19, 07 @ 7:09 am:
In Springfield, I love watching the distortion heavy experimental, three-piece jam in a basement.It’s mesmerizing. Then again, if someone wants to give me cheaper cable, I could easily live without it.
- oldie opah - Thursday, Apr 19, 07 @ 9:03 am:
Yes companies should provide public access,but I cannot let Pickels comment go unchallenged. The BIG cabinetts will not be installed in front of everyones home. They will go where current local telephone distribution cabinets are. Rep’s from At&t have been meeting with the municipalities for most of the year to address these types of concerns. The city of Naperville is the the bigest problem because their lawyer is a horses a– Its about competition people I am tired of Comcast raising my bill any time they want.
- crowdson - Thursday, Apr 19, 07 @ 4:38 pm:
As the manager of Access-4, Springfield’s public access station (and a former student employee of the station when it was at UIS), I obviously am very pro-public access. I’m not going to try to pick a favorite show, but I would like to correct some of the other comments for anyone following this thread.
“Think Global†said that cable is non-globalcentric. That’s the point of public access – it provides an outlet for local people to talk about things of interest to their community. We do have shows that could have a wider audience, and some of them are on YouTube (Just Two Guys, the Shooting Sport), but trying to appeal to a global audience defeats the purpose of the channel. On the technical side, a large number of our community producers and viewers don’t have high-speed broadband or the technical knowledge to put their shows on the internet, even if they wanted to (it seems simple to you and me, but I’ve worked with people here who literally didn’t know what a mouse was for).
Also, I haven’t heard of any cable companies anywhere using public access as their selling point, but in my opinion, they should. Local programming is something that satellite and AT&T-type competitors can’t provide.
The show that Guy Montag and Frank Booth were talking about is “Poop-TV presents…†on at 4:30am, 12:30pm and 9:30pm every Thursday. It’s one of our more unusual offerings.
To answer the off-topic complaint by Disgusted, Insight has always been part owned by Comcast - they didn’t sell it, the partnership just ended, so half of Insight’s systems is going back to Comcast. Until the deal is finalized, we are still operating as Insight. Unfortunately, your wish for a la carte service will never happen – at least not in the next decade. Cable has to pay the networks for each channel they offer. If they were offered a la cart, you’d be stuck with the 5 or so most popular channels because not enough people would order the other channels to make them worth carrying.
I appreciate what I Watch It had to say, but just to be clear, the city council meetings, Illinois Channel and NASA broadcasts are on the Municipal channel (ch. 18), and the school stuff was probably on the Educational channel (22), not on Public Access (ch. 4). They are all provided to the city by cable, though, and would be affected by HB1500. And in defense of the “militant, anti-white racistâ€, he has mellowed quite a bit over the last 15 or so years that his show has been on, and mainly talks about religion and black pride now. His name is Mbanna Kantako and his show is Restoring African Pride with Raw African Power, on Fridays at 1:30am, 9:30am, and 6:30pm. He’s a nice guy, very easy to work with, and is well-known as the first pirate radio operator in the US.
All right – I think that’s about it. Sorry for being so long-winded.
Unsolicited plug – stop by my sites:
www.imaketv.com - my home page
http://imaketv.blogspot.com - for video producers
http://banddot.blogspot.com - for indie musicians
www.banddot.com - indie rock music videos
- Tom Tresser - Friday, Apr 20, 07 @ 1:38 pm:
Absolutely. The air waves and the rights of way that make broadcasting and cable possible are public assets and media companies that profit from these assets should be required to set aside some “commons” for public programming. An informed citizenry is vital for a healthy democracy - and that includes a diversity of views and access to the public soap box by as many people as possible. As commercial media becomes more concentrated under the control of a handful of mega-companies, I feel that the diversity of opinion and ability to monitor and hold government and business accountable has been greatly compromised.