Public Access Television: A Radical Critique

Abstract

America’s most notable attempt at radical telecommunication policy public access television (PA-TV). PA-TV extracts resources from cable television companies in support of individuals and groups to produce and distribute video programming to their communities. PA-TV gives ordinary citizens direct access to society’s most powerful mass medium, television, and provides financial support to make that access effective: PA-TV’s experiment in speaking truth to power has been supported with nearly $2 billion dollars. These resources have supported policy goals that are explicitly political: the creation of what democratic theorists call a free speech forum and what radical social theorists call a public sphere.

Yet public access TV presents a puzzle. Why have its social impacts have been so modest? The Washington policy makers who created PA-TV anticipated that it would energize communities, enhance local culture, and stimulate grassroots democracy. The grassroots activists saw it as a tool to puncture the one dimensional consciousness of advanced capitalist society. After thirty years there is little convincing evidence that public access has affected communities in the manner and to the degree that early proponents anticipated. Certainly, it has had its achievements. Yet PA-TV’s impacts contrast markedly with that of another local medium, talk show radio, to which is attributed a key role in US society’s political and social shift to conservatism (ref). How could policies as promising as public access TV seemingly fall so short?

This article seeks to explain PA-TV’s seemingly modest impacts in terms of its institutional structure. PA-TV’s history needs to be understood not so much in terms of the actions of the individuals who operate, oversee, and use the access centers, but in terms of its overarching structures, such as its regulatory framework, organizational form, technology, and professional culture. These institutions have channeled and constrained individuals’ action in ways that have hindered PA-TV’s ability to achieve its goals.