The topic of the day — bannered in block type across the screen — is "Jesus Christ Was the Black Messiah." Our host is Dr. Luscious Conley, the resident black supremacist on Tampa Bay Community Network (TBCN), the Hillsborough County public access station. An 80-year-old WWII veteran, he wears a rumpled golf shirt, thick-framed glasses and a camo-colored trucker hat. With one camera trained on him, he tends to look down, to look around, to look, well, not exactly dialed in.
It does not take long for things to go bad. After mumbling for a few minutes about Jesus' pigmentation, the scourge of Bush and racism, Dr. Conley takes his first call.
"You're on with Dr. Conley," he blurts in a deep Southern accent.
"Dr. Conley, how big is your trouser snake?" asks a young woman.
Dr. Conley, who's not a doctor of any sort, pauses and then hits a button. Beep. He hangs up.
Next caller: "Dr. Conley, could you demonstrate with your fingers how big…"
Beep.
"You haven't answered my question about your trouser snake…"
Beep.
"SHOW US YOUR TITS!"
Beep.
"I'm watching you."
"You supposed to be watchin' me," Conley retorts. "You lookin' at television."
"Dr. Conley, do you prefer men or women? Are you gay?"
Beep.
The calls become squalls of feedback, random squawks and blurts of speech — "COCKSUCK…" — mixed with a barrage of beeps. It's as if the public access station has come down with a bad case of Tourette's syndrome.
Welcome to the sometimes loopy world of public access cable, where citizens have the right to go on television and say or do whatever they want (to a point), where Dr. Conley has the right to ramble about how white folks are headed to hell for praying to a white Jesus, and kids have the right to call in and bust his balls.
Over its two-decade Bay area history, public access has been an outpost of raw, unfiltered speech, which can make people nervous or offended or angry. Often called an electronic soapbox, it's a forum where neo-Nazis and Klansmen have sporadically held court over the years (although not currently). Sexually explicit programs have occasionally found a home there as well. In an era of rampant media consolidation and increasingly crafted messages, public access, in all of its ragged glory, is the little runt that nips and nips and won't leave.
Over the years, certain groups have tried to shoo it away. The cable companies, which had to carry public access on their backs as part of initial franchise agreements, generally viewed the obligation as a waste of perfectly good channels. In Tampa, Time Warner turned over public access to the nonprofit Speak Up Tampa Bay in 2000. (Nationally, only about 20 percent of public access is still run by the cable industry.)
Local politicians are largely viewed as the biggest threat to these community stations. Two years ago, Hillsborough County Commissioner Ronda Storms, a champion of the religious right, raised a ruckus when she heard about a TBCN program called The Happy Show that ran video of a woman soaping her genitals in a shower. Storms asked state attorney Mark Ober to bring obscenity charges against the host, White Chocolate (real name Charles Perkins). Ober declined. She then convinced the commission to defund the station. The board concocted a story saying it had to reroute the $355,000 a year to more pressing needs. TBCN sued and won an injunction. Furthermore, a judge warned the commission that it would probably lose in court and be forced to fund public access.
This is where the station's biggest ally — the First Amendment — came into play. Community access outlets are prohibited from censoring their programming, which is something that politicos tend to forget. 'When we went through the controversy, what never really made the press coverage was that it was [the county's] contract that required us not to censor," says Louise Thompson, executive director of Speak Up Tampa Bay.
In the end, TBCN and the county negotiated a settlement that essentially required the station to tighten up its act and audit a small percentage of programs.
Still, there's a vague sense of unease at TBCN, which is housed in a 5,000-square-foot building near University of Tampa. With the recent election having restructured the county commission to include five conservative members, staffers wonder, quietly, whether the body will continue to fork over the dollars when the contract comes up for renewal next September. The question then becomes: Can they get by with just the $550,000 provided by the city?
'I think a lot of the commissioners have been around since we [improved the operation]," says Speak Up Tampa Bay board member Roy Kaplan, executive director of the National Conference for Community and Justice, Tampa Bay Region. 'I don't think it's out of the question that the county will support us in the future."
Recently departed Hillsborough County Commissioner Pat Frank says she can't get a read on the county's stance toward funding public access. 'The station has made improvements, but I don't know how much there's been a softening [in the commission]," she says. 'A good percentage of the programs are religious, which would seem to please some of the members of the board. On the other hand, if there is no public access channel, you don't have the problems anymore. There still may be some sentiment to have that happen."
Across the bay, the public access station, called Access Pinellas, is run by the county and does not receive funds from incorporated towns. The channel gets by on an annual budget that fluctuates between $200,000 and $300,000. It has a far smaller staff, although the Pinellas operation does benefit from a three-year-old, $8.3-million facility (which also houses the government station) in downtown Clearwater paid for by the Penny For Pinellas tax.
While TBCN occupies choice lower-tier channels 19 and 20, Access Pinellas makes do on Ch. 96.
Unlike its Hillsborough counterpart, the Pinellas operation does not run live programs and people provide shows once a month, compared to most Hillsborough shows, which run weekly. The station also carries a waiting list of 120-150 people who want to take the training necessary to become programmers. It takes three to six months to get inside a classroom, says Access Pinellas head Ron Hebert.
Furthermore, several large municipalities in Pinellas, including St. Petersburg and Largo, do not carry public access. Why? In St. Pete, the city council in 1989 decided not to include public access when it renegotiated its deal with Paragon Cable. According to a report in the St. Petersburg Times, City Councilman Charles Shorter explained his objections this way: 'From what I know about it, if you have public access it means that almost any kind of group can hide behind First Amendment privileges, and I simply don't want that. It's the fact that I wanted to keep all kinds of junk and trash off the telecast, it's just that simple."
It's all but impossible to watch public access for hours on end. Even people with an insatiable hunger for camp will wear down. You can only soak up so many minutes of a psychic demonstrating various 'divination tools," or two young women sitting in front of a pink backdrop giggling over inside jokes.
Public access has long been the haven of this sort of lowbrow self-indulgence. Without it, we wouldn't have Wayne's World. But these channels are not just repositories for weirdos, freaks and pervs. They're also venues for the tiniest of special interest groups to get their message across, everything from recovery groups to Girl Scout troops. Community cable is also a hotbed for religious shows, be it Christian Bible beaters, Muslims who just want to be understood, New Age spiritualists, atheists, or in the case of Pinellas, Scientologists. Then there's the stream of interview and panel programs.
'I have had members get mad at me for saying this, but I'd call it pedestrian at times," says Bunnie Reidel, executive director of the D.C.-based Alliance for Community Media. 'Things like elderly people talking about social security benefits."
Because budgets are always tight, public access stations rarely do audience measurements. A handful of studies have estimated that the viewership runs from 5 to 15 percent of cable watchers. TBCN reaches about 250,000 cable subscribers, about the same as Access Pinellas.
Citizen programmers don't seem to be preoccupied with audience size. For most of them, it's all about letting it fly, venting spleen, having fun. A few programs, like the TBCN car show Overdrive, strive for solid production values, but a far larger portion opt to just let the cameras roll.
Access Pinellas' Hebert breaks it down like this: 'There are basically three types of programmers. Ones who don't really care about quality, but have a specific message to get across. I would say that's about 80 percent. Another group is just sort of goofing around. And there's about 10 percent who would not mind a career in the field."
There's long been a push nationally to upgrade the general quality of public access programming. 'I'd like to see a mindset where it's more professional," says Kaplan, 'more oriented toward developing a community perspective and not just a forum for egos."
Reidel sees it differently. 'Some people want to try to professionalize the medium," she says. 'But that tends to take the people aspect out of it. Everything else we see is so processed."
The idea for public access came about in the late '60s when New York City was first wired for cable. Manhattan's nascent franchise agreement called for the city's two cable companies to set aside four channels — two for the public and two for government. Manhattan's public access went live in July 1971.
A year later, the Federal Communications Commission issued an order requiring all cable systems in the top 100 U.S. markets to provide three access channels, one each for government, educational and public use. In '76, the mandate was extended to all systems with at least 3,500 subscribers. This gave rise to so-called PEG stations (Public, Educational, Government) that spread rapidly throughout the country.
In 1984, after public access endured setbacks in the courts, Senator Barry Goldwater championed the Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act, allowing local governments to require PEG channels.
Over the years, funding tended to skew more strongly to the G in PEG. In Hillsborough, for instance, the county government channel, HTV-22, gets $2.4 million a year from the county only, and the Tampa government channel, CTTV, will get $4.2 million this fiscal year from the city's communications services tax. Public access manages with $900,000 total from city and county, and the education stations slightly less than that. This disparity, public access advocates say, is simply a matter of local government channeling more funds to their own mouthpiece, a medium that they can control. (For more about how local governments are spending millions of tax dollars on their own cable television P.R. and propaganda, see this week's Political Whore column.)
When cable began taking root in Tampa Bay in the early '80s, local governments made a trade with cable firms. In exchange for allowing the companies to dig up public rights of way, the systems set aside channels for PEG use. The original cable deals were for 15 years, which enabled PEG to become entrenched.
It didn't take long for cable companies to become less and less interested in running public access. The industry consolidated, and when contract renegotiations came up, nonprofit groups emerged or governments stepped in to take over operations. Most public access officials agree that relieving cable companies of public access has benefited the medium.
Speak Up Tampa Bay began in the mid-'90s as a nonprofit community dialogue group spearheaded by Creative Loafing/Weekly Planet CEO Ben Eason as part of a civic journalism effort. When Time Warner's franchise deal came up for renewal and it wanted to dump public access, the city approached Speak Up Tampa Bay about taking over. Another, Christian-based group joined the sweepstakes, but Eason's organization won the bid. It took over TBCN in April 2000.
Eason, Speak Up Tampa Bay's president, says the project has had its ups and downs. 'On the one hand, with all the bureaucracies and Ronda Storms, it's been disheartening and brutal," he says. 'Then on the other side, it's White Chocolates and that ilk that cause us grief. It's been difficult and at times not very satisfying. That said, after fours years I'm very optimistic."
The influx of nonprofits has made public access channels more vulnerable to the whims of governments that fund them. Controversies have only exacerbated tensions. But they tend to be overblown. In two decades of local public access, there have been only a handful of genuinely offensive programs involving hate speech and sexual content. Programmer White Chocolate/Charles Perkins spurred the Hillsborough County Commission backlash in 2002 with his naked lady in the shower. But observers contend that Storms rained down on TBCN because Perkins also savagely mocked her on his show.
'Many people, they only look at the few bad things that come across once in a blue moon," Hebert says. 'The community is full of adults and teenagers who produce responsibly."
Sometimes the shows are downright altruistic. One TBCN programmer goes out every Sunday and videos church services in low-income communities. The station also owns a large remote truck that it uses to tape University of Tampa sports, local parades and other events. Another programmer takes the truck to animal-control facilities every other week and shows unwanted pets. More than 300 have been adopted.
Jason Stevens has an infectious laugh. The host of Scream at the Wall on Access Pinellas sits with a sidekick and comments on clips from a less-than-B movie titled Bite Me, which is set in a strip club where people get attacked by giant bugs. It's cracking him up. He's complaining that the film did not use the titty bar setting to its best advantage, basically because it didn't show enough tits. "I got, like, half a hard-on when I watched it," he says, and then chuckles his ass off. Aw, but then "actress" Misty Mundae shows up on screen. As Scream at the Wall shows a brief segment of her topless, Stevens lets out a lusty sigh. And then he laughs — long, loud and hilariously. It's a laugh that says, "I get the joke; do you?"
It's been quiet lately on the public access front. There's been no nudity in Hillsborough recently, and only a bit in Pinellas. Likewise, bigoted speech is all but nonexistent. Dr. Conley is anomalous; besides, his message is so jumbled it can hardly be taken as a serious threat.
Louise Thompson, head of Speak Up Tampa Bay, likes it this way. "It's been about eight months since we've been called the White Chocolate channel and I hope we don't hear it again," she says. Still, she's not about to take any measures to block potentially controversial speech from making it onto the channel. Historically, the bigots and sleazeballs have come in ebbs and flows, and there's reason to expect that at some point they'll be back.
She hopes that a return won't spark another defunding move by the county commission.
Public access operators nationwide share her anxieties. Thompson tells the story of a channel that was expunged from a budget because it ran a show by a guy who painted his privates and presented a talking penis. "People are losing channels every day," Thompson says. "It's political football every day."
Reidel of the Alliance of Community Media doesn't paint as dire a picture. "I wouldn't say public access is under siege," she says. "The economy's been so bad at the state and local level that a lot of stations are taking budget cuts, just like other services. There are stations in jeopardy here and there, but there is also a lot of brand new public access starting up. By and large, what I see is growth in public access."
Mostly, the Louise Thompsons of the world want local governments to get their thinking straight on the public access issue. Is it too much to ask elected officials to embrace freedom of speech? Station personnel want politicos to realize that if they strip station budgets because of objectionable material, they risk killing hour after hour of community service and information.
Besides, advocates maintain, public access is not the radical lefty mechanism it's thought to be. Thompson reckons that if you had to array TBCN's programming across the political spectrum, about a third would be left, a third would be right and a third would be neutral.
Further, public access is actually in the government's interest.
"Public access can actually take a burden off government," Reidel says. "It allows nonprofit entities serving the community to get the word out for free. If they didn't exist, the government would have to somehow fill that role."It's like an outtake from American Gothic. The elderly woman stands bolt upright gently plucking her acoustic bass. Her husband sits on a hay bale strumming a guitar. After several bars, they break into a down-home gospel tune. The Barbers — Weaver, 80, and Mildred, 75 — perform their music for TBCN once a week. They used to take their act to retirement homes; now the retirement homes watch Country Gospel (Live) on TV.
The couple will be married 60 years in February. "We always do everything together," says Mildred. They agree that having a show on public access keeps them active, their minds sharp. They get recognized now and then. Someone even bought them lunch once.
While Speak Up Tampa Bay was going through its showdown with the county commission, Weaver and Mildred turned up at every hearing. "I think you had some commissioners trying to feather their nest by getting rid of public access," Weaver says. "I personally don't agree with all the programming, but we need to keep freedom of speech. I know every program is not designed for me."
