TRULY PUBLIC TELEVISION
By Bruce Campbell

Noncommercial television should address itself to the ideal of excellence, not the idea of acceptability. – E.B. White, 1967

Whether you know it or not, your local cable television franchise is waiting for you to come to their offices and make a TV show expressing your opinion.

Now that your attention is snagged, we could talk about the caveats and broken promises. But the fact is that many more cable systems are offering public access broadcast time – including free production facilities and training – than people in communities are using them. According to the Global Village CAT (www.openchannel.se/cat/index.htm), a Sweden-based web site, some 2,000 PEG channels (public, education and government) are currently in existence, and many people reading this article could quickly take advantage of this media opportunity successfully.

This is an optimal time to get to know the possibilities in your community, because a significant change in technology is about to change the television landscape: digital television. Once the transmission format issues are resolved, video is going to be all digits all the time, meaning that you and your consumer videocam and your Mac-based editing software (or those of your local school or library) are going to be shooting and editing shows from tabletops – perhaps even sending the signal from your house. This represents a significant reduction in technical barriers (see "Hire a teenager" below) and a significant increase in shooting flexibility.

Part of success is finding out everything you need to know, and that’s the easy part. The Internet is full of resources:

The other part of success – pulling it off – is the real work. Some of the stories these web sites tell are either of intransigent cable franchisees who put up logistical barriers to community members, often in the name of lawsuit protection, or of local politics that have created a kind of electronic red-lining to keep some in and some out. Good old-fashioned community mobilizing can be brought to bear to take care of these hurdles.

Then the only remaining part is the show-making aspect. The websites listed above are thorough and point to references that give a complete run-down of the planning, production and promotion processes. On the strategy side, here are a few considerations:

Think "unique"

The best use of PATV happens when the programming achieves something that can’t be done in other ways such as public rallies, sermons, door-to-door campaigns, or online chat rooms. Can you show pictures of living conditions, cross-cultural activities, sewer drainage or performances? Can you get people to speak who are articulate or vivid but who don’t usually get a chance? Better your production values suffer a little if it means getting out of a studio and showing something in a unique way. Sometimes just putting the production means into the hands of people who have never used it before is not only empowering, but fascinating television.

Involvement = viewership

Given that your show will go unlisted in even the local paper, unpromoted on-air and probably unseen except by people who push the wrong buttons on the remote, your best strategy to attract an audience is to involve the potential audience in the production. You could put your parish outreach committee on the air, but why not the whole local church council or coalition, in one form or another? If you must air a discussion by three-people-and-a-potted-plant in a studio, at least make a live audience out of your friends and neighbors. Can your programming idea or issue be co-produced with local partners – high-school classes, community college classes, senior centers, libraries or clubs? Partners also bring access to their publicity vehicles – not to mention much-needed assistance in scrounging up a continuous feed of content ideas.

Hire a teenager

Natural technophiles are an important ally for you, as are high energy levels. An important side benefit is putting media access into young hands at an impressionable age; in addition to empowerment, this goes a long way toward interrupting the creation of patterns of passive media consumption.

Be realistic

You are not going to draw Oprah’s numbers. But that shouldn’t be a goal. E.B. White was speaking specifically about public television in the quote above, but his point obtains for public access as well. Excellence in this case means demonstrating the kind of diverse and complex ideas that make up the fabric of any community, so that the process of "manufactured consent" is interrupted the next time that tough questions are raised. Do it well, and let your neighbors know when you’re on, and you may have a small audience but high impact.

One side note: If your community is small enough, you may have a crack at commercial television. During 15 years as rector of Trinity Church in Alpena, Mich., and with no background in television, the Rev. J. Thomas Downs ran a half-hour news and discussion program on Sunday mornings and succeeded in garnering Nielsen numbers. Partnering with a Congregational church nearby, he purchased time at a "not wildly prohibitive" rate from the local CBS affiliate. "We didn’t see any point in public access," says Downs. "Where we live, no one would have seen us." In larger markets, of course, public access may be more widely used and visible. Public or commercial, if you’d like to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of planning a weekly program, Downs is happy to field inquiries: tdowns@eastmich.org.

Bruce Campbell is a media editor for The Witness who lives in Tarrytown, N.Y.