Efforts in the United States
Wes Brain & Suzi Aufderheide
(UPPNET & NorthWest Alliance for Community Media)
INTRODUCTION:
Suzi Aufderheide is a videographer with Story Images and has 15 years of video and Community Access experience. As a long-time member of the Alliance For Community Media she currently sits on their Northwest Region's Board. While a member of the ACM Board Suzi has served as Treasurer and Co-chair of the Grassroots and Equal Opportunity Committee. Suzi edits for OPEU District Four Productions which produces the regular labor/media show: "Unions, Power For People Who Work." She is also the newly elected Treasurer of The Multi-Cultural Association of Southern Oregon.
Wes Brain is a board member of SEIU#503, the Oregon Public Employees Union, and he is producer of "Unions, Power For People Who Work." Wes is on the board of UPPNET, Union Producers and Programmers Network . He serves on the city of Ashland Fiber Network's Citizen Programming Committee (for cable television), and is the President of the Rogue Valley Organizing Committee of The Labor Party.
Labor needs a media voice in the United States. Television has become the number one image and information medium, but labor's voice is negligible at best. To the masses it is faintly heard, if even heard at all. Although there are many fine independent producers in the U.S. most find their programs delivered via Community Access Television to a relatively small percentages of people. The resulting presence of a nation-wide voice for working people is sorely lacking. It is time to consolidate the many localized efforts and establish a National Labor Channel.
Given television's present corporate structure and the failure of calls for fairness and open access in the new telecommunications environments, prospects for an increase in labor's presence on American television currently looks bleak with the current power structure. It is time to rewrite the script, take the initiative, and try something bold. That is the plan submitted to the recent national convention of the AFL-CIO in Los Angeles where resolutions
were heard for a National Labor Channel.
UPPNET'S VISION:
Reaching citizens with unbiased and positive news about labor issues and the concerns of working people is crucial to building the labor movement into the political and social force it should be in the United States. There is a consistent anti-union and anti-progressive bias in mainstream television. The labor movement needs a National Cable Channel available to homes across the country. Our cable systems carry fundamentalist Christian channels, a conservative political channel, shopping channels, food channels, and exercise channels.
Why not a labor channel?
"UPPNET has consistently championed the idea of a national labor cable television network", are the words of Howard Kling, President of UPPNET. As visioned, a National Labor Channel would consistently feature workers, working families, unions and union issues. Topics would reflect hot issues of the day such as social security, education, organizing, international trade agreements like the upcoming WTO meeting, prevailing wage, plus national and international solidarity actions. Sometimes there would be programs about labor history or about a working class heroine or hero.
Labor television programs would be uplinked via satellite and employ a combination of public, educational, and leased access channels to downlink and deliver the programming to communities. This model is based on Deep Dish TV's distribution network which has successfully delivered progressive video programming to communities throughout the United States since the 80's. The project would be guided by a Board of Directors of participant unions. Funding would come from unions and grants from foundations.
UPPNET believes the timing is right for a National Labor Channel, and the need has never been more critical. Their are plenty of fine television media productions in the United States and the opportunity to broadcast them throughout the country is an exciting prospect.
UNITED STATES' MEDIA PRODUCTIONS:
There are currently over 30 communities nation-wide that enjoy the benefits of consistent labor television programming through the efforts of local producers. There are also several statewide distribution systems. And, "labor cable television works," says Simin Farkhondeh, UPPNET board member and producer/director of Labor X in New York City. "The programs created locally in city after city, like ours here in New York, have had a proven impact on the labor movement and on the community at large. Consistency is key to building an audience and maintaining that impact."
To better understand labor media in the United States let us look now at one part of the country, the Midwest, as we hear a recent report from Larry Duncan who is an UPPNET board member and co-producer of Labor Beat, Chicago, Illinois.
In the fall of 1998 a Midwest Labor Media Conference took place in Madison, Wisconsin, hosted by the School for Workers, which is connected with the Univ. of Wisconsin. UPPNET, a co-sponsor of the meeting, sent a number of representatives. Involved in this conference were three labor TV groups (Univ. of Minnesota, Labor Beat/Chicago, Solidarity/Kalamazoo, MI) and three Labor radio producers (Illinois Labor Forum/Champaign, IL; Labor Express/Chicago; Madison Labor; Madison, WI). Other labor media producers, although prevented from attending for various reasons, also endorsed the conference, including
LaborVision in St. Louis and a labor radio show in Iowa. The conference set up an e-mail listserve covering Midwest labor stories. Another result of the conference is that recently Rockford United Labor (the labor council in Rockford, IL, the second largest city in Illinois) has voted to sponsor the Labor Beat show on the local cable-tv system. Radio reporters from the Madison labor radio show and the Champaign-Urbana (where University of Illinois is) labor radio show plan to be in Seattle to send reports back to the Midwest on the protests against the WTO. Labor Beat (Chicago) recently produced a 5-hour long all-labor programming special on Chicago cable channel 21. This presented a preview of what a labor channel could be like. (I would like to note that I do not claim to have information on all labor tv/radio developments in the Midwest, and apologize for any information omitted.)
-Larry Duncan
Community Access Television is the current delivery system used for most of Labor Television in the United States. A National Labor Channel will need to increase the use of this already successful system, and strengthen both parties; Labor and Community Access Television.
Alliance For Community Media (A.C.M.):
International Chair Alliance for Community Media Erik Mollberg Bunnie Reidell, Executive Director Access Fort Wayne 666 11th Street, NW, Suite 806 900 Webster Street Washington, DC 20001-4542 USA
Fort Wayne, Indiana 46802 USA Voice: (202) 393- 2650
Voice: (219) 421-1248 Fax: (202) 393- 2653
Fax: (219) 422- 9688 e-mail: acm@alliancecm.org
e-mail: erikm66345@aol.com
www.alliancecm.org
For more than twenty-five years, the Alliance for Community Media has worked to recognize and support access by each citizen to electronic media; particularly cable television. In order for democracy to flourish people must be active participants in their government, educated to think critically and free to express themselves. The mission of the ACM is to advance democratic ideals by insuring that people have access to electronic media and by promoting effective communications through community uses of media.
Our members are Public Educational and Government (PEG) access center professionals and volunteers, educators, librarians, civil libertarians, non-profit organizations, free speech advocates, computer/internet communications professionals, senior citizen groups, government officials, community activists, interested individuals, and students, etc..
The more than 2000 Community Access Television centers in the United States are managed and staffed in a number of different ways. They can be non-profit organizations, cable companies, educational institutions, local governments, libraries and others. Some examples of "others" are: high schools, cities, municipalities, local origination or leased access and private production companies. The most popular and successful model, by consensus, is the non-profit organization. Typically this is because the essential non-profit Board of Directors tends to be democratic as well as advocates for the channels as well as for the continued availability of healthy and vigorous free speech forums. Non-profit organizations also have no other agendas as a cable company, government organization or an educational facility might.
Community media center budgets can be as small as $10,000, with a subscriber base of 5000 persons, as at Crossroads Community Video in Corinth, Mississippi* (their entire budget comes from sources other than the cable company). Extremely small communities, with less than 1000 citizens do not have to pay subscriber fees. Large cities with large subscriber bases have considerably larger budgets, facilities and constituencies. Manhattan Neighborhood Network in New York City, for example, has a $5-and-1/2-million-dollar-per-year budget with a cable franchise population area of 1,487,536 citizens and 475,000 cable subscribers.* In 1994, 95% of this budget is from the cable company and 5% is other. (These figures have obviously shifted some since 1994. Also, the Cable Act of 1996 had a huge impact releasing cable companies from some of the "burden" of providing media to citizens.)* "Community Media Resource Directory", pgs.164 and 186.
Foundational to the beginnings of PEG access television was legislation requiring cable companies set aside a percentage of gross subscriber fees, generally 5%, and cablespace for PEG Access Television. These monies, often called franchise fees, were collected by the city, county. or other municipality, from the cable company for use of public rights of way. (Satellite has recently been mandated to set aside 4% of band width based on these same principles. Arguments about satellite delivery and public rights of way are interesting, because, in a sense we are agreeing that each citizen <property owner> has some ownership of airwaves.)! Stars, next?
".....governments can play a constructive role in making markets work better, thereby lessening the need for government involvement in the future, and, in particular, obviating intrusive, content- based regulation....it can do so by making more competitive markets that are currently dominated by entrenched monopolies."** Certainly, the weakest model of community access centers has been the one which has relied on mostly extreme left-wing-type politics, for public access centers. Or, government access which sees itself, formal government bodies, as the only voice of politics in democracy. Or educational access which insists that education happens only within a very narrow base. Balance and diversity are paramount to the success of community access television.
For the National Labor Channel to continue to grow and expand and considering that the AFL-CIO wants to employ the television media to produce commercials there is an excellent opportunity to work together on a campaign. The campaign could use a single logo for a commercial and a for a National Labor Magazine pilot. Next, air the commercial on network television at the same time that the pilot National Labor Magazine program is cablecast on as many as 2000 Community Access Television centers in the United States. There are three benefits that come from a campaign of this sort. They are: 1. Inertia dispelled; many new activists engaged. Community access television normally takes a local sponsor to cablecast a program. 2. Image changed in as many media as possible at once (consider simultaneous print, radio and internet also). 3. Launching of the next phase of a very important project. Many newly motivated activists who are now also highly involved in seeing to it that this National Labor Channel is a success. And who knows, many of these activists, with a little training, will become producers of labor television themselves. We are another step closer to the final goal of a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, television channel, the National Labor Channel. "...communications structures in many ways map our social connections, and our communications practices express our cultural habits and understandings."**
**{Aufderheide, Patricia "Communications Policy and the Public Interest"pg. 261).
AFL-CIO RESOLUTIONS
On October 12, 1999 at the AFL-CIO 23rd biennial Convention in Los Angeles, two labor media resolutions were considered: #30, The Development of a Labor Cable Television Channel, and #31, Labor Cable Program/FSTV.
Resolution #30, The Development of a Labor Cable Television Channel calls for:
1) AFL-CIO to investigate the establishment of a 24-hour labor cable channel broadcast by satellite and will, if feasible, seek support from all affiliates for the programming of this channel on every cable system in the United States.
2) AFL-CIO to fund a study of the role of media monopolization and privatization of public television and the censorship of labor programming as a result of these policies.
3) AFL-CIO to ask for the inclusion of a labor representative on all telecommunication commissions and bodies, including the FCC, CPB, PBS and NPR.
4) AFL-CIO to support the call for a congressional hearing on the issue of monopolization of the media and the threat that this means to freedom of speech as well as the exclusion of labor programming, not only on all commercial networks but on the PBS/NPR system as well.
Resolution #31, Labor Cable Program/FSTV calls for:
AFL-CIO to support the UPPNET/FSTV initiative to establish a weekly labor TV show on satellite television that has the potential of reaching 6 million homes as well as 7 million which FSTV presently reaches on cable.
Both resolutions were heard on the AFL-CIO convention floor. Leo Canty, UPPNET board member& labor tv producer spoke in support of the "Development of a Labor Cable Television Channel." At the convention both resolutions were referred to AFL-CIO's Public Policy Committee which will meet after the first of the year.
SIGN ON LETTER OF ENDORSEMENT:
A sign on letter of endorsement for the resolutions currently before the AFL-CIO's Public Policy Committee will be available.