Deep Dish TV (United States)

Beginnings

Deep Dish was started by DeeDee Halleck and Paper Tiger Television, a video collective that since 1981 has been producing a series on media, culture, and politics for Manhattan public access TV. Their goal is to provide viewers nationally a chance to see video work by producers from around the United States and the world. Public access had grown in the United States on a city-by-city basis, and videomakers producing within the access system had few possibilities to show their work more widely. Producers had sometimes sent tapes to a station, asking staff to forward them to other access facilities after use, a cumbersome process known as “bicycling.” With the spread of satellite cablecasting in the 1980s, the opportunity arose to create an informal network of access stations to receive simultaneous transmissions.

Paper Tiger TV issued a call to access and independent producers to submit short works on highprofile issues of the mid–1980s—homelessness, the collapse of family farms, and U.S. government interventions in Central America, among others—and compiled the pieces into a 10-hour series dubbed Deep Dish Television. The collective rented time on a commercial satellite and made the programming available free of charge to access centers, educational channels, and home dish owners. Paper Tiger members coordinated publicity efforts and compiled a database of access stations interested in the programming, for future distribution campaigns. The series provided enhanced visibility to many producers, displayed the achievements of the access community, expanded the availability of programming for access stations, and countered mainstream media reportage on a range of controversial issues.

For its second season in 1988, Paper Tiger decentralized editorial control to access producers from around the country, and Deep Dish TV established its own central staff in New York City to fund-raise, publicize the series, and handle distribution. The second series once more collected small pieces and excerpts from larger works into hour-long shows, organized by theme, such as AIDS and labor rights, or by originating community, such as work by youth, senior citizens, and Latina/o producers. Deep Dish also began distributing single-work, long-form productions to augment its compilations.

In 1990, faced with the drive toward war in the Persian Gulf and the accompanying mainstream news jingoism, Deep Dish distributed the Gulf Crisis TV Project (GCTV). The four-part series was distributed to access and public television stations and enjoyed significant international exhibition as well, including on Britain's Channel 4. GCTV showed the possibilities for timely responses by independent producers to pressing issues of the day, combining camcorders, satellite distribution, and a publicity and distribution infrastructure to reach audiences in numbers and locations previously out of reach for low-budget, alternative productions.

Later Productions

Subsequent Deep Dish seasons have included Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired (on health care, 1994), Shocking and Awful (the second war against Iraq, 2005), and Waves of Change (grassroots media from around the world, 2008). Deep Dish produced the first season of the television edition of the radio news program Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and in 1999 collaborated with alternative producers to create Showdown in[Page 164]Seattle, a series of nightly reports on the protests against the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle. Showdown in Seattle, shown on access channels and the satellite network Deep Dish TV through Free Speech TV, achieved new heights of viewership for alternative media reportage. This effort to immediately counter mainstream coverage through video and the Internet spawned the Independent Media Center movement.

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