Pursuant to a relatively new California statute, 12 Los Angeles public access studios are shutting down, killing a vibrant and celebrated community of volunteer TV producers. According to the LA Weekly, the mayor reallocated the funds that provided the TV studios, staff and equipment to other areas of government, leaving only governmental and educational access centers operating, thereby eliminating the free speec aspect of LA access…
… due to a state law written for AT&T by former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the fall of 2006, cable-television companies are being allowed to escape a 31-year-old requirement to give back to the public from which they draw their riches. Lawmakers in a few weeks can finally shut up the little guys.
“It was clear when the law was written that it spelled the death knell of public access,” says Judy Dugan, research director of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group in Santa Monica.
The LATimes offers some more perspective…
The new law is designed to make it easier for phone companies to enter into the lucrative cable market by relieving them of certain money-draining contractual obligations.
In Los Angeles, 12 public access studios that provided programming for 11 community channels have been closed by Time Warner Cable Inc. That means much of the city’s diverse, neighborhood-specific public access shows may disappear.
If that happens, Los Angeles cable subscribers would be losing an outlet for their particular communities’ programming, said David Hernandez, president of the Los Angeles Public Access Coalition.
“It’s the regional broadcasting capability that’s lost,” he said.
Twenty other states, including Texas, Nevada, Florida, Illinois and Michigan, have enacted legislation similar to California’s Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act, or DIVCA, according to the nonprofit Alliance for Community Media. In several of those states, the loss of production studios was bitterly fought by opposition groups to little avail.
January 16th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
This is possibly one of the most disturbing things I have read on this subject of cable providers looking to squash community access television. It seems to me that not enough people are getting involved, maybe because they think it doesn’t concern them, but it does… it concerns everyone. This is a basic right of society. We are being told that we have to give up something that rightfully belongs to us, just because million dollar moguls don’t want to pay for it… which they are legally obligated to do. I urge any and everyone involved with community access media to involve their friends and loved ones. If it is important to you, it should be important to them as well. Every time a big company gets a precedent like this, it’s just one more chip in their pot to keep going after the rest of us…!
January 17th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Fabian Nunez is an incredible blow hard (so is Arnold.) But thankfully Nunez is finally termed out. Sadly, there is a long line of blow hards waiting to replace these guys.
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