Bunnie Riedel is hopping mad, and that means bad news for some big names in television journalism.
Riedel is the executive director of the Washington-based Alliance for Community Media, a nonprofit organization that represents public, educational and government community-access channels. The alliance has 1,400 individual and group members and represents about 5,000 cable channels nationally.
And right now, its leader is locked in battle with Washington's WETA, one of the nation's most powerful public television stations, and the Freedom Forum, an international foundation with an endowment of more than $1 billion and an announced goal of serving the interests of a "free press, free speech and free spirit for all people."
WETA and the Freedom Forum are partners in a new venture, the Forum Network, a proposed regional cable channel devoted to 24-hour-a-day public-affairs programming. The new network is the reason for Riedel's wrath. As she sees it, the media giants are trying to get on cable systems by pushing members of her organization off community-access channels.
"It's appalling," Riedel says of the Forum Network's strategy of trying to gain control of access channels now occupied by local community producers as varied as individual musicians, victims of domestic abuse, school districts and city governments.
"The Freedom Forum is supposed to promote free speech, not try to bury it by grabbing the people's media," she says. "I understand their desperation. They have millions of dollars invested in this venture. But they need to understand that access-channel capacity is for community use."
Community-access cable channels usually attract attention only when a show challenges boundaries of taste, such as a proposed "Ku Klux Klan Hour" in Texas, or when parody is involved, as with "Wayne's World," the "Saturday Night Live" sketch about a fictional cable show featuring a couple of zonked-out heavy-metal-loving teens.
But Riedel says the access channels are "electronic green space," providing television "by, for and of the people. This is the one place where nonprofits, community groups and individuals can become active participants in media rather than just passive recipients of media."
The battle between Riedel and the Forum Network came to the Beltway suburbs of Montgomery County one night last week. The issues at a meeting of the county's Cable Communications Advisory Committee were huge: Whom do the access channels belong to and how is the public interest best served in allocating them? Who is the public -- the grass-roots producers of public-access shows in each community or the executives and stations that run public television as in PBS?
Carrying the ball for the Forum Network is its president, Ed Turner, who was one of the founding executives of CNN, the world's most dominant electronic news organization, and its managing editor until last year.
When the new project was announced in January, the Wall Street Journal described it as "a mix of public policy, political, cultural and educational programming that emphasizes intelligent analysis and reasoned discussion." The New York Times called it "a cable channel devoted to analyzing and interpreting the news -- a sort of round-the-clock NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
The objective was to launch the Forum Network in the spring on cable systems in and around the Washington metropolitan area, including Maryland and Virginia. Turner has suggested that the Forum Network would go national if the regional rollout was a success. But so far, the network has not found a home on any cable system. Channel space is tight, and cable-system operators are not in the business of giving it away.
So, Turner and his colleagues have started trying to get on community-access channels "temporarily" until they can find permanent homes on the various systems. They are now going cable system by cable system to operators in the district and in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, asking to "borrow" an access channel for six to 18 months.
"We're not trying to take anything from anybody," Turner told the 11-member advisory board. "We want to be partners with the local producers. The premise of this network is that over the decade, the quality of journalism on television has diminished to the point where there is very little for those of us who care about public issues and public policy at the local, regional and national level."
There is a need and an appetite among a niche of the audience, particularly in the greater Washington area for public-affairs programming that goes beyond the headline news, WETA and the Freedom Forum say.
Turner says his channel will provide training to community-access producers and will share equipment. He also says the network offers "volume of audience, bringing tens of thousands of new viewers" to the access channels they are on. "If nobody is seeing their shows, what impact do they have?" he asks.
To which Riedel responds by describing a community-access show in Cincinnati, entitled "All About Lupus" and aimed at persons with the disease.
"If only five people with lupus tune in, then access has done its job," she says.
She also cites a show for persons with AIDS in Chicago, and another in Massachusetts that is produced by and for recent Cambodian immigrants.
"How many people watch those shows?" she asks. "Who cares? We don't exist for ratings or for audience share."
The Montgomery board had reservations of its own. "Isn't the PGA [Professional Golfers Association] a nonprofit? Would we have to give them an access channel, too, if they want one?" one member asked.
"What happens if Maryland Public Television or the Howard University public stations come in asking for an access channel?" someone else asked.
After more than two hours of questions and debate, the Montgomery board voted against the Forum Network through a variety of resolutions. But its power is only advisory. The county executive may yet grant a channel.
Meanwhile, says Elise Addie, head of promotion for WETA, the Forum Network will continue to court Beltway cable systems, despite the objections of Riedel's group. She adds that she is optimistic that WETA will soon be able to announce agreements with such systems.
Similar deals are being worked out elsewhere. Access channels are being folded into public television in Hawaii. And Ervin Duggan, the president of PBS, says he thinks access channels would be put to better use if brought into partnership with PBS nationally.
William A. Shade, executive director of Montgomery Community Television Inc., the organization of access producers in Montgomery County, which opposed the Forum Network, is not persuaded.
"This proposed network may have some value, but it's not access," Shade says. "Access is targeted, local programming created by and for the community. If we give up access channels to let anything else appear on them, we are giving up on our mission and reason for being."
Pub Date: 3/27/99