the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants in do not reflect those of b m c or the town of belmont b m c welcomes your comments call us at  in the next week is community media day and free speech week two thousand and eighteen and i have with me with me today jeff hansel who is the executive director of the media center to talk about what it means to be a public media center and what free speech is in it is what's happening to free speech in today's world thanks for joining me jeff thanks for having me on your show roger let's start out with explaining what community media day and free speech week is and then let's delve into some of the substance well belmont media center is one of hundreds of community television stations across the country we are funded through a federal statute through franchise fees paid by cable t v cable v providers and those fees essentially fund the operations and public green space that are community channels across the country this is the contract that was just negotiated  when i say community media in my world i guess we're talking about community stations community radio and so we're celebrating community media in communities across the country reminding people of the kinds of services the activities the opportunities that the community has to use their channel and this is really these are belmont's channels now let's back up for a minute because i think it's important for people to understand the role of community media centers this all started in new york and it sort of acknowledged i'm going to tell you what my impression i'll say sure you can tell me whether i'm right or wrong that's fine but it's sort of acknowledged the fact that simply standing up on a soapbox on the corner no longer reaches the the public that given electronic media there needed to be community access to that media allow in this country unlike other democracies in say western europe or other parts of the world we're going to allow private companies to build telecommunications infrastructure and maintain that and we're not going to it's not going to be owned by the public so if you remember bell used to be a monopoly it was heavily regulated search government utility companies regulated like utilities like when aapl utilities cable t v came into existence and initially the idea was it is about it's when you when company were going to regulate it so but over a period of time the cable companies got their way with the regulatory scheme but what they were able to get out of that was to say if you're going to operate these this infrastructure over public rights of way and there's going to be limited choices and limited impact we want you to make one local channel in that in every community where you're going  give people an opportunity to use that infrastructure you know because in a sense is has community impact in other words come cast is very large it's a private company but  speech it strikes me that a lot of people and i would even go so far as to say maybe most people think of it in terms of political speech but there are lots of different ways to manifest free speech because part of what we do here at the moment media center is educational free speech if that's a term i yeah we try to get people educated on what's going on in the local community you know you try to inform  people in a way that allows people to look at the facts look at the information and then make a decision one of the key ways that we do that in community media and this is one of the founding principles when they when we s was that let's record the meetings and activities of local government local schools and make that available to everybody and let people see how their government's working and make their own decisions about who should be elected what should be funded what decisions should be made and that in belmont it's become a really really important thing over the years that i've been here where people want more of this they want to be able to hold government accountable but a lot of the lectern officials depend on it to communicate what is going on so actually it's interesting because when there are public presentations today the and i'm involved with a fair number of those but people look at the audience and say well we really don't know that the breadth of who are reaching because there are people either streaming us online it's showing people here's what you have access to that is really your space to to use to express yourself in any way that you feel motivated or passionate about so we have a couple of poets some musicians we will have a couple of writers are going to talk read from their book and we have someone from the director library will be here to talk about their libraries relationship to the media center and their role in their central role in providing free speech and conversation you know in the community so it's a variety of things in these events are happening all over message that our news director will be participating in a panel that's going to talk about the importance of hyper local news in what's becoming news deserts across the country where you just don't have access to what's going on and we think about belmont we're very lucky to have two news central part of it is recording as many activities as many meetings as possible so the public can be informed about what's good and allow the reporters to actually also see with him is what you do here in  akin to what happens elsewhere in other communities that have public media snow since yeah where we're about we're not that much different from other communities in the we're smaller than some there are some very small communities that have community media that are struggling but we've been we started a news program about a year ago and many community centers are doing new shows because there isn't anything like that in their communicate get local news anywhere else except on line if there happens to be a still local paper and if you really want to know what the planning board is doing or what the board or the school committee you really can get that now through the belmont journal the local or other programs in there are both audio programs and visual i don't know if that's those of the two terms but let's close enough you can you can either listen to it on line or you can watch it on your television and yet a lot of people as you know are going to podcast because they can listen to it anywhere and they can be informed they don't have to devote their waking hours to watching a screen to get it they can listen to it so a lot of programs now that we do know my journal this show our podcasts allow people to listen to it anywhere anytime they want to the thing i want to say that people are not aware that  today people talk about oh i can i got free speech i have access to media i go in you tube i go in twitter i go and facebook you know this and that in fact those are all private networks private companies a lot of people use them and they're used a lot for advertising as we've seen also recently they've been invaded and meddled with where you don't actually know what you're looking at when you look at facebook or  don't know is that authentic speech of someone who express their opinion or is that somebody trying to stir up an argument about an issue that is not doesn't even true so there's a lot of news there's a lot of that that happens media community t v channels ok are actually public green space you know it's noncommercial in large part and so when you talk about what's a public media where public media facebook twitter you tube is not public whatever you put on you tube can be taken down at any time and i was going to it is there as a result of that chipping away at free speech or is it becoming more and more open reliant i'm not really sure the trend but if you just think about the fact that fewer and fewer businesses own more and more of the networks it's got to be concerning for people and this is one area where it's certainly free from being hacked i mean somebody could walk in and want to do a show but they have to live here they have to there are certain obligations that they have to meet to do a show here one of them being that be a resident of the town or associate with the town so it tends to weed out people who are using that want to use this for nefarious purposes or whatever it's just it's more open and more accountable if you want more authentic well from the opposite side to if somebody wants to present a particular viewpoint irrespective of what the viewpoint is they can come in and see the media center and then there's a staff here that will help people produce a show right whereas with you tube let's say you know i have no idea of how to produce something for you too bad that one isn't taught how to produce a  for you to where they're they're actually trying to do more of that so i give them credit for that ok and if you saw facebook recently they've taken down a lot of fake sites and they're trying to weed through they're trying to but people need to know that they're not these are not public spaces that are reserved for average citizens in a sense they're advertising platforms and as long as they can pay for the advertising the allow citizens to use it but if people if they can't make money doing it they might just go away yeah and yeah community media is really one of the last bastions community meeting community radio community television where it is open and in fact the thing to know is when they brought community or pig public education government channeled into existence by federal statute it was defined that these are going to be reserved and set aside for local communities for schools for government for residence that's what they're there for one point there was a court case where someone challenge that someone on a community t v channel was actually speaking for the city or speaking for the school or being representative of a cable company the court said that these channels are not defined to be the speech of the cable writer or the city or the school it's the person who's speaking who owns that speech so in a way we're even more interested insulated from any commercial influence so i can come on and say anything the only person who's responsible is me yes not not not even the organization i work for but having said that everything is not rosy and the public media world there  is a rule that's mean considered by the f c c the federal communications commission that could have a real adverse impact on you folks it could it's where we fight these challenges all the time unfortunately but is issuing a rule that we don't not think is going to go into effect because thanks to senator ed markey use a leader in telecommunications reform and legislation has always been a supporter of pagan community media so he is essentially trying to fight that but he needs the help of people across the country the f c c well everybody is looking at all these are things that are going on if he sees effect a rule that sensually redefines everything in the law doesn't change the law but says oh red is now blue and blue is no red and so we we don't have to stick to what we and that could and the problem with this law is it doesn't just affect belmont it affects everybody across the country and we're it we could be in danger of losing all these stations and people might think well you know i don't watch it very much i don't use it very much but just like any other writer privilege that you have you're going to miss it if it goes away all of a sudden realize you don't have that anymore it's not going to be here because well i want it frankly particularly this fall when we have two major issues the issue of where marijuana retail stores are going to be located in then the whole issue about whether to build a new seven through twelve school right i would think that people would be sensitive to needing and wanting local information and local information you're not going to see on channel four t v you know you're not going to find in the globe you're not going to find in their old you know and i think what people begin to appreciate i know i do i live in cambridge and we have community cambridge community is that as a separate non profit that's mandated by the town to serve residents we can put anything on we can reach out to a number of groups we can encourage free speech we can encourage community conversations and where we don't we're not elected officials so we're not beholding to particular and i think that actually elected officials prefer that over across the country where that channel can be used and it can be used as a platform of information but it's not so political in that way if you know what i mean it's not yeah you can't go back up the chain and blame somebody for something because it's just information that's on the channel but it's informative you know so it's less as i say it's less likely to be used for you know partisan political uses you know the funding or anything else so the other thing i want to say is the town of belmont is declaring october th community media day and free speech week so we'll be talking about that vote bit but following the community meeting in october th we are going to show people how they can weigh in on this rule how they can basically we hope tell the f c c and congress say no to this rule don't adopt it we want we want our belmont media center we want to a community t v station and to keep being funded so that's really what we're going to be asking people do you ask in the town our local elected officials state elected officials and residents to come in and make their opinions no to defeat this measure do you find it is this being pursued and i'm asking i'm going to ask you to attribute  motivation that you perhaps can't or won't do but is it knowing effort do you shut down community media stations there certainly could be some motivation there when you see how some political action committees operate or some some elected officials operate where for example if they can somehow discourage people from voting in some backhanded way or indirect way that they will sometimes do that or if they can shut somebody down to speak here it's more really about the funding in the money it's a it's a minuscule amount of money that comcast pays to fund this compared to the amount of profits that they take out of the community of course and what we also say is that because there is a media center people are more likely to be cable subscribers because they can't get it if they don't subscribe to cable so it's a mode it is actually we think and i think in many communities an incentive for people to be subscribers that argument has not always found any kind of a welcome by by some of the companies in some cases that has but i guess the answer short answer is it's all about money control of the airwaves and the companies that operate want to have that control and don't want to have this distraction of having to fund local channels because it takes too much time and it's unfortunate that they've taken that view in the old days when they started community t v it wasn't it was felt that it was a way to a public service a public service the customer is always right and serve the community and they've just gotten so far away from that so do you we're running a little short on time if we can come back to the happening on october t here at the belmont media center from one to five o'clock i want you and there are people who are are participating but i can people just come over and watch thank you very much you can sign up we'll have free food and drinks  provided by local establishment so you can come in and get a bite to eat have a drink watch some of the activities you can also be able to come in and sign up to state your opinion about this f c c rule so people will show people how to do that but or they can sign up online go to belmont media dot org and click on the link and you can sign yourself up and they will we will be running this program later after after it's over  this would be also the start of an annual celebration that we will do here on community media day we're also hoping that every month to do a free speech open mike event to occur there would be great finds every month come in and we'll have a similar center thank you to the listeners for tuning into community conversations you can access community conversations by streaming us online at belmont media dot org and you can also access community conversations by searching for the b m c pod cast network on i tunes this is been community conversations i'm your host roger colton i will talk to you again next time