c been there a long time i can remember he was involved with the alternative media center back and some decades back along with red burns he's a pioneer in the development of public access cable television communication tree he got me to make sure i got down to a recent meeting of the alliance for community media a collection of people concerned with public access across the country that convened a couple weeks ago in wash was thanking them for that and i thank you for such a very well led life if i may i please share because i've been reading over a lot recently about public access they're very interested in it is a phenomenon and as i understand from a lot of the literature i was reading last night and you'd be familiar with the having been there at the beginning a lot was going on in canada before developed here i think you were involved in some of that maybe you could share a little of your own background where you're out from originally and then the beginnings of public access that seemed to have roots in canada if i'm not if i'm reading the record right i was very fortunate to be invited to cat and i had been a producer of sponsored films mostly for old student of mine who was in town as i'm working at the film board suggested that they invite me out for a while ok because i had made had made sponsored films very much like the ones that they were headed by nick redeveloped college friend from alabama university dog carolina who had worked at the film board for four years during the war he hired me is as a scriptwriter  because he had worked for the harm security administration and he had contracts with agricultural agent says and i said well i don't know anything about movies he said don't worry we will bring people down from the and doing advertising with our local shows but they were doing very well and we persuaded them to let us start using those channels to get our stuff out ok what are you producing and what will the film  it's below the center and we were able to demonstrate that what it got out on the wire it will hold up i remember michael there was a group along about one thousand nine hundred and seventy you were on the scene and you had seen the dean was a friend of yours and eugene and so forth and there was a mother's ever parker there were others but you were there and there was a commission all it did you want to address of a little bit who was involved in that as you remember and what did it have to say about the future of communications that was relevant to what actually emerged well it the assumption was  four that it's at the policy grounding statements on communication prior to when public acts when cable television was actually even being introduced i think through the public  dead right because it did that dissipate that there was some paybacks some access that that the public should have and wasn't explicit yeah ok you got it was  institutional framework by which things are going on i was just busy doing doing programmes and so forth and i can remember the sloan commission report and it was a thing that was a very interest to me that they were they were they were coming along and you could make programs and it made it available because there was a new medium of abundance was the subtitle of that that we were going to many channel capacity was going to be a new abundant capacity and that seems to me to be something to still going on as we begin to get along with our friends and open source people within the internet and so forth but the idea of an abundant capability as opposed to a limited or scarce capability to  product and so forth was part of the of the change that was going on no that's true yeah and now we are ready for the biggest change now ok i see yeah before we were it was assumed that if the ordinary person had a chance to speak and to communicate his or her ideas that was enough we don't know that that result of that now we were way ahead of that and challenge for change because most of us film as well made not just to be broadcast but to be shown in public meetings they could make a change that could make a change right a i'm very pleased to say that all around the country now and you've got it in the meeting in washington yeah all around the country access centers are becoming more and more not just place this way of programming is made by producers what was going on in terms or because i would just take them to the time warner or sterling manhattan or teleprompter turn them in and play them but there was all this institutional framework being built and that's something that's a great interest to me and i think it might be shared with the wider audience that we have a unique company we have a unique thing a merging if i may with well i think of sydney dean and so mothers you and others but there were the representatives the civil society which in a certain stood outside of the normal power and influence relationship of the society of the corporate private sector profit making and then you have what we call the government which can tax and spend and regulate and then there were people coming out of the civil society that had a major influence in terms of setting the structure around one thousand nine hundred and seventy that time there was a great deal going on and they set aside and had the cable companies agree to set aside income from what would be otherwise their retained earnings the corporations there were a lot of the franchise agreement which was as lord beaverbrook in england said a license to print money they were going to make serious money by taking this in so there was a good idea of competition that they were going to set aside some for public educational and governmental considerations and that was negotiated and that idea that that was able to become established and seeming accepted law by the cable industry and the people there concerned with communications seems to me totally unique because it gets serious money from there or otherwise retained earnings through the end of these that set up like ours manhattan network and others across the country to set up and a reasonably competitive playing field for the people which is sort of unique in terms of the history of communications that the money that is given to the city for regulation and for public access is added an addition to the other fees so it's clear on the the  to them comes out of the monies that they get by charging people for the product as a liver so that's part of their earning right and they set aside like mr paley again when he said of c b s had no obligation to have a quick m capability for the people to produce television rather than the professionals within the industry or the products that are offered in the market to the general society and as i said to you in a conversation and i mean just before we started and the steel industry has no such obligation the automobile industry is none such or any of the other aspects of the operation of the economy with the with the exception of public access cable television and it makes it very unique in the fact that that was able to assert itself and you and mr parker and mr dean and so forth were instrumental in bringing that little window of capability for something to get to the people rather than having it go through the normal dialectic yes in fourteen states and fourteen sates the legislatures have passed regulations that require the cable companies to have state wide franchises not local franchises ok and it's much easier for the lobbyists to get to the states houses instead of each individual city and so as a result of that many of the access of us around the country have had their money cut backs considerably ok i would want to go into some detail the process by which that happened so that it might be avoided by our responsible citizen view in this program because it's not a good tendency all we could do is have them stay in touch with the state legislature and make sure that this doesn't happen in the states was there not reaction at the beginning you were talking at the beginning of public education in the government that fits in traditional pattern of influence and power in an area but the public for the public they were going to with their objection to that by the people who were getting the initial franchises le context of thinking in that well remember that there was a competition for the franchise that's right lace ok and the people who wanted the franchise would promise you everything that's because they wanted that license money they promise to yeah i had friends yeah it was a valuable thing and so that's why the city's made bargains with them and bore long we access move out what training cities  dreamed up they idea of peg public education public and i was a bit uncomfortable with that ok because i said when the wars are on the fights it is over there's going to be a fight over money ok and sure the government's going to you know you read in the communications act the seventy two and seventy six and seventy nine there were developments changing and the f c c had a role in that and there was a developing they said a standard of over three thousand five hundred dollars subscribers had to allow for this there  and he was but were there people who said we don't want to have to take money to set up something for something so abstract or you know hard to define as the people were the accountability going to be you've got the whole of the people of manhattan let's say they are going to be responsible that's obviously unworkable it doesn't work there weren't entities to give accountability where there are people who are saying we don't want to have that be something that we're go  people in one county would see how it made public issues public right and also they realize that it always benefited almost always b and i was doing programs and i wouldn't paying attention to the institution of own lately been really turning my attention to i remember doing a couple one was a man named gerald levin and he was the head of home box office happy as a lark they had just been able to link up with tells capacity now maybe we can put up our intellectual leadership channel that we're going to cross the country and i had a gentleman i was talking to were warmer hands over intrapreneur coffee and you know what's a good idea errol but he or get through beyond the regulations and the requirements he's very much in favor of the public access ted turner likes it i know as another person out of there was part of the thing but the public relations benefit of the existence of something so democratic as public as public access could be something that from a public relations standpoint could be very very beneficial to the major players don't you think x s thank you on the table i thank you for that i am a surprise in the sense in a certain sense i thought about it there wouldn't have been more opposition from the cable people who would be claiming we need to  profit margin to cost of the we're going to lay out this cable that high cost we're bringing all these are and it doesn't apply to any other aspect of the society i mean it seems to be very unique and they would be able to make the normal arguments i can see were a number of people would make that are and yet it seems to be accepted across the country that the cable companies are now over eyes and coming in with philo's violence and all that and that they accept this idea that they're going to be a franchising process with the mayor's office or whatever the local and that there will be these serious amounts of money set aside for providing for the public access that it was except sort of inexact excepted law and not constitutionally challenge and so forth by people industry leaders who wonder retain all those earnings for their own investment you know you know feasibility worked out studies and but you're leaving some one big shift you see one public you just can't let people put on anything to you're always got that level of a thing about you know obscenity and that kind of stuff but just a business thing but did it does seem to be accepted by the cable industry people by and large there's a there's conflict there's some people do but it seems to have been accepted where they set this responsibility but what i was suggesting they might be able to accept that favorably particularly if there is a drift toward what we call real democracy being a package of bull p r issue as the society evolves that it could be part of the jewel in the crown of the cable industry they do this relations and many things for these stop when they would they had many many more channels technology allowed them to have many many more tat and that's the trend is continuing that's right yes so that before those sheilds those extra channels they could sell to people now they can still sell the channels of people and still have these extra channels yeah when i give them all where there's name brooklyn those are a sure wiggle room a long time but what we do have yes is these battles of the say legislate yes i want to you spoke about that fourteen states where that's drawn on this and there will be elements within that are let's say the business row that were just as soon not have to bother with all of this business of setting aside money from their earnings as they deal with this and they would like to do away with it i don't know if there was part of that in the communications act in ninety six or not but in this is a problem where they take it to the state level and this is something we should keep an eye on yes and this citizenry should keep an eye on that because the idea of democracy people being able to communicate is really a very very important causes that shift i happen to go from the local to the state because the lobbyist is over the years the cable company a better chance to cut back on its obligation if that's their intention that's are there many people in the cable industry that celebrate the idea of public access to you you know the cable television so i mean i'm down so aware of them now i was by the way when we st started the alternate media yes and showed people how to set up public access and we were able to find and read byrnes was particularly good at this yes we were able to find a number of cable operators who saw that as their advantage thing and what to to be  they could use some of them for that and it was only later that we got the idea that the excess of the should be and dependent agents is king and i was delighted when the  of accountability to you have to have you know yeah if they're putting that money out then there would want to be some accountability for but it also has a political control and so you have public support or let's say city council members and political support for this idea and it seems to me like a really good i think democracy is a good idea and the idea that you have something that is democratic where is the other things are all controlled by the pros or the people that have a vested interest in it is such a good idea whose time we but there should be general support among the general citizenry maybe no involvement with the directly at all good if they can come let's say here to the reasons why at the alternate media center we set up these access saturn yeah and we developed a kind of philosophy has grown and grown and grown org since the early seventy's and we set up the really very important and that was the alliance that the meeting had just a couple weeks ago in washington still going on do you think that thing is in place so you can guard you would guard against a group taking over an access center like at the level of the board of directors is that possible that there is people just taking over setting probably of course either methods by the a lot that the alliance can exert good practices principles you know yeah that guards against orleans puts a spotlight when somebody gets out and the founding principles by laws mission and all that sort of thing is pretty well understood in this democratic mode of what you're encouraging so that if somebody goes off the ranch as they say you could put a spotlight on it as a group we have we have hauled we have model procedures we have a model set up so all of that is one of the jobs of the of the alliance  and that's a good and then also to put some connection to the public and garnering and keeping the public support for the institutional you know for the for the institution itself of public access  have an obligation and my and this is yes this is my say turn if you send us have an obligation to do their best to have the parts of the way because one of the things is like the industry is looking for a star if you're in c b s or something you want to star a carol burnett or somebody who's going to get eyeballs to get advertising but here you can have the junior high school pageant or something that is not going to be a star is the real people and that's a democratic representation and that there's an ability we have hundreds or even thousands of people become participate and have a say here of people that aren't stars not everybody is a tiger woods and there's a democratic component to communication that's important and this is an opening that makes that possible that's important st one of the st principles that's involved yeah the sex picture the age of make sure and so forth yeah but that does not happen without effort on the part of the staff yeah look at the effort we put in manhattan neighborhood network put into the youth channel for example yeah and got a whiff you know what we do and they like yeah there are and they can have those things and it seems to me they're also because we're working and are in terms of setting up a national alliance of producers because they have an interest in this and they don't have too many people think if you're really good you'll be on n b c or something or within one of those networks this is a different proposition this is a thing for the people i think that's really very very it seems to me really very important that  be there in that that's part of its characteristic i was trying to think there was something that i was trying to cue off that i was thinking the fact that these things these things do exist you have these different kinds of sydney dean this of those reaching for sydney dean i went to a lot of his papers with eugene and god bless her she's lovely his widow and he was one and he used to use the term development and he said that they the capacity should always be more than the demand and if not then you have to go to st come st serve but if you want to do is expand it and as i understand some of the cyber fellows i'm talking we have four channels now here say manhattan network they could become twelve and things bandwidth and there can be an expansion so there can be an incl pattern of greater numbers of people without diminishing and that seems to be one of the promises of the technologies coming along like the cavalry over the hill it seems that public access was pioneering out there in the seventy's and now it's coming in the can is the cable i mean the computer and the internet and so forth is coming in league with the pick of the open source people within that role in support of the general theme of let's letting the people have a real say over things he was chairman at the time talking and he like public access there are lot of people who like it very much and you know that kind of thing but in this movement where you have this state's going at the state level this is a dangerous thing where that's happened in that's under to be has to some people that are not you know favorably disposed toward this idea of democratic public access institutional support as i say the industry is trying to cut down on the support so some who supported within the industry again back to that thing of public relations it's important it seems to me and it seems to me something that particularly if the mood is changing or something i don't know how anybody citizen would be against unless they had some special dog in that fight you know in terms of their their immediate special interest or something but no idea itself is so democratic and so appealing think we're a very crucial time i think our work and systems that are species leave though i don't think we have vision our political or business leadership or intellectual leadership for institutional changes that their future requires it concerns me i've got four grandchildren and it's just a concern of that and i think i have some ideas that are relevant to how that could be done that run against the grain and so it's a sense of purpose and mission and intellectu curiosity and liking people and that sort of thing but really is just essentially it's idealistic and very very driven by a sense that we need a real massive change in the evolution of consciousness calls for well it takes many citizens with your commitment to make public access work so i want to commend you well for what you've done over the you have a sense now i may be totally delusional i mean it could be that but i i just think there's a real honest to god democracy may be in the air i mean real economic democracy and liberation i think we live in a system where it's all controlled by a few blue kratz who own the assets and it's sort of like a feudal the state the way the world is set up you know a few people own everything and everybody else is locked into their system and are just like rd son of the state they just go along with it and i think we need a massive change and there's some things blowing in there when that signal that and so you just try to find a place where that can be brought out as a way of being a template for media centers and my view is going to come out of the people and public access is a window that allows that to happen and may grow and prosper and everything and i look i see positive possibilities for that and i thank you for the people who are setting that is no framework for making it and i think it's very important the finance the fact that it's financed that way and i think that could become that's like the d n a of communication and communications like d n a and one hundred  the human organism they all count we've got a social organization or only a few come and that's not good we need something else better than that and they're going to have to have some sort of a qualitative transformation where we'll have the full realization of the full human potential within an ecological context that might been be offsetting the fact that we now have weapons systems that if they're on least within about a half an hour limits the whole species there's something new blowing in the wind is they say and we have got vision of that by our so called leadership and it will come out of the mass of the people in my view and so for that reason there's something worth paying attention to and that's what motivates me is just idealism coming with pre conceived ideas of the right answer so they get into a class and i want to know what can i what  to get a grade not how do i learned what do i learned in this class and what is the right answer to get a grade well i think that that is a whole school system is developing that kind of limited conformity i couldn't agree with you more and i'm very much concerned that public access do something about this i don't know quite how it can do it why i think you've become an alternate sort of a term autodi act i use the professor and i had the same problem and only one you and i bit of thought about sixty seven years universities and that kind of thing but i got kind of radically inclined to mr mcluhan and mr fuller and some other things like that and i used to and i'm free since you asked me personally i always pathologically anti authoritarian i really dislike authoritarianism when i was a professor students would come into the room and they would say to me ok we've got a pro what do i have to do to be in a a b a c and looking for that outer directed something or other that i just can't abide so what i did is i used to give everybody an a on the st day and that was just i said ok you all got your a now go away or you do which i want and i'll be here every day and if you want to come will do something and so and i would be there and then what happened is a lot of people who got their way to get the growth ports so they can get in business or something whatever they had and then what happened is my class just got filled with all the smartest people on the campus and it was just that they had nothing to do with that authoritarian i think the school system by and large largely is set up to teach people to be reform i think is coming through the media why would anybody want to go and sit and listen to somebody you know under those kind of thing it's not a system or something i think is loose and that's not where the answers are going to come from but i dealt with by simply doing away with it but that could not be abided by the administration that the whole i would i could all go away we had it that way you know that that would undercut and then i said they should become media centers the universities and use the there's like talent and they become talent the professors and then you set up media centers for getting it out to communicate in the make it available in a sort of coming around because you've got the you tube and you've got the thing where you can get the best minds if you want to know somebody you can to the internet we had a hard time with the open university trying to bring them here lord perry he had the open university in britain where they use television to get to the people who want to try and do it here and the ones who were really objecting to that were the that's what motivates me and i think television is important and so that's what's going on now and i'm trying to get the measure of the beginnings of this unique and particularly the financing that this thing that they've agreed to setting this up because i think that might amount to a change and not only over the means of communication which is like the d n a but it might lead to where we will have a change in influence over the people over the means of production a much larger thing because the whole of the economy and the whole of the society is is exempt from that plane it's all plutocratic owned by a tiny class of people and all the political entities in the world the capital is not formed in a way there's no distribution of income by ownership of the assets that are in policing responsible for production we need a qualitative chance from asia i guess most ideal is think that's needed but it's a synergistic being happy mr fuller just had it i'm sorry i just go you should have brought that up for buckminster fuller inspire me marshall mcluhan and a whole lot of other but i'm inspired with a sense of purpose and that so i think he should be particularly honored because he do the power but he didn't want it to go in the direction that his his brothers wanted to go and so he knew the territory yes you know who was running  so i'm glad to did he was there and they got that all set up and you were there and ever parker and the others and i thank you for all of that and i think participate is a great honor to talk to you and thank you thank you very much always good to talk  among others but one of the major founding fathers of public access the great