by Arcata City Council candidate (2002) Dex Anderson
I have been astounded by the glaring difference between how many different people from different parties and factions have asked me about public access television, and how little my fellow candidates choose to address the problem. While the public complains of how their monthly fee is taken without any accounting, and of how the station’s quality of service and programming has declined so far in the space of just a couple of years, half of my fellow candidates (to the best of my knowledge) have said nothing at all on the subject.
At least Mr. Test is forthright in how much he likes the course the station has taken since he and his friends on the Council took it over in the middle of his term. All Mr. Meserve can manage to bleat out is how much he likes the Ink People. I guess this is supposed to make us feel better that an out-of-town organization with its own agenda and membership to serve has now taken over our town’s right to public access.
To spell things out for the current City Council majority and their cheerleaders in the media, the public is not satisfied with the present misuse and plans for the greater misuse of our own television station. These elected representatives have put the entire station in the lap of Dan Hauser, with no public (or council) oversight, and he has put it in the lap of Rob Amerman and Michael Stowell, leaders of the old ACAT cabal along with Roland Yartzoff. Kind of funny when the whole point of the City’s takeover was to get it out of their hands and develop a new, Arcata-based system of democratic ownership and control.
This misappropriation of authority has made the station useless to public access producers, who can no longer edit their programming for later cable-cast on Channel 12. This is thanks to APEG Staff under “Station Operator” Amerman, who insist on using the editing bay as a third cable-casting deck, overusing and misusing it to the point where it became non-functional. This, plus the lack of operating camera equipment (which haven’t been serviced in over ten months) and the extremely limited access to it, has made APEG unable to meet its requirements of providing us, the citizens with the ability to make our own shows and air them. All this despite the fact that we all pay extra to have this service for ourselves.
This doesn’t even cover the legal hot-water the City treads into with the issue of taking over equipment that belongs to the public, and taking over programs that partially belong to those who made them. By airing those programs without the permission of the producers who made them, the City and soon the Ink People would be in the position of violating copyright laws. I honestly wonder how the Ink People, dedicated to artist’s rights, would deal with handling stolen property in this regard.
And now the great new plan courtesy of this same Stowell character, to “affiliate” away our public access station to Free Speech Television, two time zones away, without so much as a Consent Calendar vote by the City Council, much less a public consultation process. While I happen to like a lot of the programming on FSTV, I also know that I have the option of paying for services that allow me to view this channel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week already, without having a copy of these same programs on another channel.
There are two much greater problems with this plan. One is that contracting out time on Channel 12 for some out-of-area entity to fill with its own message will crowd out the time that’s supposed to be available for LOCALLY MADE programs. The second is that affiliating a PEG channel with an outside business is a potential CRIME, outside the requirements of the cable regulations that created public access tv. Can the City afford to lose another law suit? Can the Ink People, who sent out a letter recently pleading poverty and threatening to shut down without more funding, afford a legal battle it will be sucked into by agreeing to Stowell’s scheme?
Instead of selling out the average Arcatan’s interests in having a free voice on tv, let’s sit down in a Town Hall meeting and lay all the issues on the table, and come to a credible consensus. Something like a democratic institution, solely dedicated to ensuring equal access by the greatest number of citizens possible. No more secret operations of the station, no more dumping public access money into the black hole of the General Fund, never to be seen again. APEG shouldn’t be haunted by ACAT’s ghosts lets put responsible people with real media experience in these critical positions. In short (too late), let’s restore Channel 12 to a station that we’d actually want to watch, because right now, it’s unwatchable and unusable.