The threat of public access: an interview with Chris Hill and Brian Springer - Interview

Who owns the media, and why should humanists, care? Ownership and control of the mainstream media are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a dwindling number of privately held conglomerates. Executive decision-making power is exercised at so rarefied and stratospheric a level that the media policy pursued by these conglomerates eludes any serious democratic oversight. As a result, the media is all too often in the propaganda business, the hidden-agenda business, the bread-and-circuses business. It is, in fact, the major vehicle for the transmission of the secular myths by which we live - myths which obscure reality and serve to maintain and protect powerful, anti-democratic interests in our society.

These days, a whopping majority of Americans - as reflected in virtually every poll taken in the last several years - think our country has gone seriously off-track. And yet, instead of a responsible discussion of national issues, the media has served up a rancid stew of sensation, spectacle, disasters, geek shows, and blatantly diversionary nonissues. The Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding imbroglio, for example, was an astonishing example of a story imposed on Americans from above. I wish I had a 10-dollar bill for each time I saw, over the last few months, a journalists' discussion panel on C-SPAN in which a caller phoned in to say, "Why do we have to see Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan on the front page every day?" - only to have some smug journalist respond, without a trace of comprehension: "It's what the people want." That affair reached its disgraceful conclusion when 300 reporters descended upon Lillehammer to cover the women's figure-skating competition - many fewer than were covering the S&L crisis in its heyday.

These days, it's fashionable to decry the "tabloidization" of the media, but this isn't happening by accident. Instead, it's what happens as control of the major media becomes increasingly centralized in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations that have redefined "news" as personal scandal and celebrity peccadillos. There are some obvious advantages to this strategy, not the least being that a citizenry fixated upon the fate of John Bobbitt's penis and Nancy Kerrigan's knee isn't going to have much in the way of mental resources left for the major issues of the day.

The control, manipulation, management, marketing, and delivery of information has always been big business in the United States - and it's about to become even bigger, thanks to the development of the information superhighway. Fans of the "free market" take note: the process has led to decreased competition and increased monopolization, as powerful companies gobble up their competitors and set themselves up as Masters of Cyberspace. Can we expect these megacorporations to exercise their power democratically, with the public interest in mind? In a recent New Yorker profile of TCI chair John Malone, Ken Auletta reported that, when TCI and the city of Vail, Colorado, could not agree on cable rates, TCI actually pulled its programming from the air and broadcast, in a continuous feed on every channel of its system, the names and home phone numbers of city officials, who were soon blitzed with irate calls from citizens who knew only that their programming had been interrupted. Needless to say, the city officials quickly came around to TCI's point of view. This is not mere hardball but a truly disturbing display of corporate muscle.

Fortunately, however, there are, all throughout the United States, individual media activists and groups like the Alliance for Community Media who have championed a whole other vision of what television can be: not corporate and commercial but democratic and community-oriented. They are currently lobbying to have public-access space included on the information superhighway and to promote and expand the whole project of public access itself.

Chris Hill and Brian Springer have been involved in these issues for many years. Hill is an independent video and public-access producer, as well as the video curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, and the president dent of the board of Buffalo's public-access operator, BCAM. Brian Springer was once hailed by the Christian Science Monitor as "a TV activist [with] a flair for guerrilla video"; he uses satellite TV feeds to capture political, religious, and media personalities in revealing and unguarded off-camera moments. (His work was featured in James Ridgway's and Kevin Rafferty's 1991 documentary Feed.) Springer is also a member of the Cable Advisory Board for the city of Buffalo, the former public-access and cable TV programmer at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and one of the founders of BCAM. Both Hill and Springer have much to say about public access and its enormous democratic potential.

(One final note: as we were going to press, the March 27 issue of the Buffalo News's "TV Topics" announced that, in order to make room for six new cable channels, it would be dropping the local public-access channels from its listings.)