Accessing Democracy: Creating Community Communications in the Hudson Valley

by DeeDee Halleck, March 11, 2009

This article is first in a series that will focus on media issues in the Hudson Valley.

Why are the public access centers of New York state lagging far behind those in other regions of the country?

Public access centers are usually community media organizations that provide studios and equipment for use by individuals and community organizations. Many offer access to computers and electronic tools, such as graphics and editing programs. Others have initiated Web radio stations where many, especially teenagers, have found expression.
Although you wouldn’t know it from the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, important experiments in democratic media are flourishing in the United States, to which people around the world look for inspiration. I recently attended a un meeting called the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland. From across the globe, communication theorists, government officials, and non-governmental organizations activists came together to assess the “state of the world” communication.

Although much of this summit, like most meetings of the kind, was limited to rhetorical flourishes and governmental posturing, the presence of several community media practitioners from over 80 countries created a unique opportunity for sharing ideas and experiences. This resulted in the creation of a unified statement by the non-governmental groups, the so-called “Civil Society,” which many feel has historic significance: a universal declaration of communication rights.

In the Geneva media discussions, one model was mentioned as a significant example of regulatory protection and enhancement of communication rights: that of the public access provisions in the United states. Public, educational, and governmental [peg] access has been a unique community media experiment regarded by many media activists throughout the world as a successful way of developing local democratic media in the face of corporate monopolies. The use of television channels and equipment on an open “first come, first served” basis has evolved in several thousand us cities and towns with varying degrees of cooperation from the cable corporations required to provide the opportunity. For many communities this has meant that cable corporations are required to provide several public channels, equipment and studio infrastructure, as well as a fixed percentage (in New York state, five percent) of the gross cable bill.

The notion of access as implementation of a democratic project has rarely been recognized by the public or acknowledged by communication theorists. For the general public, Wayne’s World remains the image of access to media programming. This is largely due to the scorn and derision heaped upon public access by network news and mass-market periodicals.

Little mention is made of the televised city council meetings, the welfare rights advocacy programs, or the homework helper shows that teens have organized and produced. No mention is made of the radical television experiments by video and performance artists, the many documentaries rejected by pbs but shown on local access, nor are community ecological watchdog programs recognized.

Understanding public access television from the vantage point of mass media is like trying to understand the complexity of a city from the banner headlines of a tabloid newspaper. And like the tabloid papers, most mass-media outlets are in the hands of the same corporations that own and control cable tv in this country and see access as a threat to their profits.