Your government at work on the air

Having
grown into a cluster of cable channels, C-SPAN has become a semi-official
American institution. Not because it offers the most consistently fascinating,
exciting programming, of course — but because it engages viewers with what
you might call “reality-check” TV. Think of routines like the latest “White
House Press Briefing With Ari Fleischer” or “gavel to gavel” coverage of the US
Senate. Were it not for coverage by C-SPAN and even newer media, live or taped,
such things might evaporate, lose their flavor, or vanish into an archive.

            You can watch this small “d”
democratic media phenomenon close to home, as well. So many local government
meetings and speeches now are on cable, it seems the “public square” has been
reformatted into the rectangular screen. Across the nation, local cable
stations broadcast speeches and routine proceedings from town boards, county
legislatures, planning commissions, and other bodies, down to the metaphorical
dog-catcher.

            Such stations, set aside on the
cable spectrum expressly to bring local government proceedings into the living
room, are found in cities as different as Concord, California, and
Indianapolis, Indiana. And some are very close to home, too. Take the small
city of Lockport, Rochester’s Erie Canal neighbor 70 miles to the west.
Lockport Community Television, officially described as a “not-for-profit PEG
(Public, Educational, and Government),” operates three cable stations, one of
them a designated government channel.

            LCTV brags it’s “one of the most
active access centers for its size in the country.” And the published schedule
backs this up: Significant blocks of time are devoted to meetings of the
Niagara County Legislature, the Lockport Common Council, and the Lockport Town
Board. There are also state-oriented offerings like Assembly Update and This
Month With Governor Pataki; and national feeds like Navy/Marine News and NASA TV.

Turn the dial to Rochester,
though, and you get the low-cal menu.

            We do have a government-access
channel here, of course. Cable Channel 12 — maintained under an agreement
between City Hall and WXXI Public Broadcasting, and offered through Time-Warner
— is reserved for government-related programming around the clock, seven days
a week. And from the published schedule at www.twrochester.com, you assume
that’s what you’re getting. At www.wxxi.org, however, you find that the
schedule, through the day and evening, includes only a smattering of actual
local-government business.

            What fills up all those time slots,
then? Mostly PBS offerings — and re-treads. A large chunk of the daytime is
taken up with PBS You, a “program
service totally devoted to YOU and your learning needs,” according to a PBS
description. The list of PBS You programs includes such things as Faith
& Reason, In Julia’s Kitchen With
Master Chefs, and Think Tank With Ben
Wattenberg. Or look at Channel 12 in late primetime, when the adult,
civic-minded audience should be most accessible: At 9 p.m., there’s the Lehrer NewsHour, which also runs on WXXI
Channel 21 at 7 p.m. At 10 p.m. comes the BBC World News, which also runs
earlier on Channel 21. And at 10:30 p.m. is another PBS repeat: Nightly Business Report.

            “The majority [of programming] is
stuff WXXI takes from its library,” says city councilmember Brian Curran. “A
lot of what is on the air is filler: national parks in Texas, cooking shows.”

            “People have asked for more
entertainment,” says Curran. But Channel 12, he says, should be zeroing in “on
important public goals.” (A WXXI spokesperson referred our call for comment to
Gary Walker, vice president for TV; Walker did not respond.)

            Why doesn’t Channel 12 further such
public goals? Money is one factor, says Curran. The city, he says, spends
around $160,000 per year now on the channel. (The figure includes the cost of
some “content” the city passes along to WXXI.). But his “ballpark estimate” is
that a station with “more substantial local programming” would run $500,000 a
year.

            A boost in spending is unlikely now,
given the city’s current and anticipated budget problems. Still, would City
Hall ever explore converting Channel 12 to the C-SPAN or Lockport Community
Television model?

            Curran says the possibility of doing
just this came up when the WXXI arrangement was brainstormed. “Apparently it’s
technically feasible,” he says. The city, he says, would just have to get the
proper video equipment and hire someone to operate it. He adds the expected
footnote: “If the budget were looking more stable…”

Looking over
the past few
years, Councilmember Tim Mains recalls his own efforts to move the issue along.

            “I kept pushing us to rethink the
relationship [and] what government-access should be about,” he says. “It was
like dragging people kicking and screaming to the table.” (There certainly is
inertia: Mains says the “long-standing relationship” between the city and WXXI
“was first suggested during the Ryan administration.”)

            Nevertheless, not long ago, Mains
thought he and other councilmembers had an agreement to broaden Channel 12’s
goals. He says he was looking for $300,000 to $350,000 to fund various
improvements. “That fell apart when we had a bad budget year last year,” he
says. But the question is still on table: As Mains says, the deal with WXXI
technically expired last year, and a new deal will have to be finalized quite
soon.

            In any event, what improvements are
possible? “We talked about expanding the message boards” on Channel 12, Mains
says. Thought was given, he says, to installing cameras in the council chamber
— for covering proceedings of city commissions as well as council meetings.
But the cameras “appeared as a scary proposition to a few of my colleagues,” he
says.

            Mains sees no great harm in running
PBS repeats on Channel 12. After all, he says, some viewers have work schedules
that make it hard for them to watch, say, the NewsHour‘s first run of the evening. “We get high-quality
broadcasts” from WXXI, he says, but we’re not getting enough access to city
government. “We’re tapping only a fraction of the interest in government
access,” Mains says. Channel 12, he says, “should be about promoting better
citizens” who are aware of “what government is doing on their behalf.”

            Which way to go now? “We can define
[Channel 12] any way we want,” says Mains. The channel, for example, could be
put under the umbrella of Rochester Community Television, along with the
community-access Channel 15. “That is the model used in some communities,” says
Mains. But such a shift, he says, would require RCTV to provide “a higher
quality signal.”

            Does the demand exist for local
C-SPAN type of coverage, under that or any other umbrella? The indications are
mixed. “We did a survey a bunch of years ago,” says Mains. But “people told us
they wanted to see more ‘uninterrupted movies.'”

Local media
activists have been watching the evolution of government access for a long while.

            “Public access has always been the
poor nephew here,” says Ron Linville, a volunteer with Metro Justice’s TV Dinner, a long-running political show
that now appears on community-access Channel 15.

            “The airwaves are going to waste” in
Rochester, Linville says. He adds that TV
Dinner staff have offered their service for council meetings, and the like.
“We would tape it, and they could air it on Channel 12,” he says.

            But some restructuring may have to
come first: “Personally, I think all three ‘PEG’ channels should be housed at
RCTV,” says TV Dinner coordinator
Nancy Rosin, who’s worked on a grant-funded video history of the Rochester
Public Market. (Rosin adds that she and TV Dinner are getting more and more
involved with Rochester Indymedia, part of an independent, decentralized,
global network that’s bypassing the commercial and “official” media alike.)

            Whatever lies ahead for Channel 12,
the question of demand will be crucial. But quantifying demand means putting it
in meaningful context. Just how many people have to show up to demonstrate a
compelling public interest?

            Brian Curran hints that the answer
doesn’t reduce to raw numbers. “It surprises me [how] people tune in to
unpredictable shows,” he says. You may get only two percent of the overall TV
audience, he says — but you’re still reaching thousands of people.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2003.