Public Access

Enabling and encouraging citizen involvement in media, public access manifests itself across a range of technologies and treatments, but its core concern is participation in social movements ensuring freedom of speech and personal, aesthetic expression. Informational and/or educational in content, it evolves from grassroots activism by nonprofessional media producers interested in issues that might be personal and/or worthy of public attention.

In its purest form, public access operates non-hierarchically, produced by artistic, advocacy-oriented volunteers. Whereas analogies have been drawn to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the 15th century and the innovation of community media in the 20th century relative to citizen access, public access has expanded into examples such blogging, map making, podcasting and iPoding, text messaging by both senders and receivers, web-zining and web-logging, wikiers, digital storytelling, video-blogging, and any number of cyberactive experiments.

We see its application on websites such as http://MediaChannel.org, the Our Media/Nuestros Medios network, the Independent Media Center (“Indymedia”), and the Alternative Media Global Project, at the World Summit on the Information Society, conferences of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, and any number of alternatives, even guerilla media resources. And so, we have entered the 21st century with entirely new means of communication and activism demanding access for the public.

Historically, it has argued that the inspiration for citizen engagement in pluralism owes a debt to Canadian documentarían Robert Flaherty's 1921 film Nanook of the North, and Canada has played a significant role in the development of public access. Although radio has been impacted by principles and practices inherent in its application, the introduction of cable technology in the 1970s in the United States took John Stuart Mill's social libertarian theory, First Amendment guarantees of free speech, and Federal Communication and Supreme Court mandates for localism and viewer rights to new levels for noncommercial television. Operating rules included the following:

• Access is to be first come, first served, and nondiscriminatory.
• A prohibition on the presentation of any advertising material designed to promote the sale of commercial products or services (including advertising by or on behalf of candidates for public office).
• A prohibition on the presentation of any lottery information.
• A prohibition on presentation of obscene and indecent matter.
• Permission of public inspection of a complete record of the names and addresses of all persons or groups requesting access time.

Stories abound. Dale City, Virginia, claims operation of the first community-operated closed-circuit television channel in the United States, whereas Grassroots TV of Aspen, Colorado, is said to be the country's first and oldest community cable television station—celebrating its 39th anniversary in 2010. Alternative Views, produced in Austin, Texas, since 1978, remains one of the longest running public access television programs in the country, and the investigative, alternative collective Paper Tiger has been airing since 1981. Then, with corporate takeovers by companies such as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, and [Page 427]others since the 1980s, dedicated supporters of the system cannot help but turn to independent media watchdog organizations and scholars to monitor events. As of today, Rob McCausland of the Alliance for Community Media, a national membership organization representing more than 3,000 PEG access centers, has indicated that local programmers produce some 20,000 hours of new programs per week, serving more than 250,000 organizations annually through the efforts of an estimated 1.2 million volunteers.

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