Good outweighs bad on public access

Debra D. Bass

Friday, April 11, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

The best thing about public access television is that anyone has an opportunity to address the community with few restrictions to content and at virtually no cost.

The worst thing about public access television is that anyone has an opportunity to address the community with few restrictions to content and at virtually no cost.

Barry Forbes of the Alliance for Community Media, a 20-year-old advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., said the same glitch holds true for any forum committed to free speech.

A group of 35 people interested in the topic attended a forum Thursday at UNLV to discuss strategies for establishing a local channel under the umbrella of Citizens for Public Access Television.

"When people hear about public access, they think, 'Oh my God, we're going to have naked Nazis on the air,'" Forbes said, noting that people forget that controversial programming amounts to a small fraction of public access.

He insists that that small fraction doesn't outweigh the benefits. Benefits like broadcasting the local track and field championships or a program devoted to counseling adolescents or a seminar on running for political office.

Free speech, he said, assumes free access. Public access channels can be established for public, educational and governmental use -- such as cable channel 4, which is shared by the county, UNLV and C-Span.

Public access channels are dedicated by the local cable franchise to allow "free" access to the medium. Ultimately, the costs are recouped by subscribers, but operating costs are minimal, Forbes said.

Municipalities granting cable company franchise rights can stipulate that an appropriate number of stations be set aside for public access. Reno has one such channel solely devoted to the community. Las Vegas has none.

Cable operators always have the option of dedicating a public access channel on their own, but Brenda Trainor, the Clark County's regional telecommunications manager said devoting a channel to public access means one less commercial channel.

"Channels are very valuable as commodities," Trainor said.

Forbes, who showed videos of numerous beneficial programs across the country, said public access "generates an estimated 20,000 hours of programming every week -- more than all the commercial networks and affiliates combined."

Yet, he argued, that commercial cable networks manage to generate considerable amounts of scenes of sex, violence and hateful stereotypes.

He said the nation needs to abandon talk of the V-chip to weed out violence from the daily television menu available to children and start using the O-chip -- the on/off switch.

Trainor said communities can ban together to weed out fringe elements by talking more about them, not less. She said that in communities faced with Ku Klux Klan programming, they succeeded in getting them off the air with community pressure and in many cases by filing suit in court.

Franchise agreements for Prime Cable, the area's largest cable company, are firm until 1999, at which time they are to be renewed with the city of Las Vegas. Agreements with Clark County's other municipalities are up for renewals by 2003.

UNLV's Greenspun School of Communication, created and sustained by the Greenspun family, co-sponsored the town meeting. The Greenspuns own Prime Cable and the SUN.