11 minute read
Viewers Like You
Public access programming, past and present
by Alexandria Neason
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Illustration by Richard A. Chance
Last summer, people across the United States flooded out of their homes, which had been converted to quarantine bunkers, and into the streets, risking one crisis in protest of another. It was not the first time that demonstrations against state-sponsored anti-Blackness had consumed national attention, our screens all tuned to the same channel. I found myself straying away from journalistic coverage, however. I preferred, instead, to watch the protests unfold in real time on videos and livestreams—first via Instagram and Twitter, then on Twitch, where surveillance-like footage flowed for hours on end.
As the summer wore on, I found Twitch to be the ideal place to follow the demonstrations. I spent days watching things happen, or nothing happen at all. I remember seeing a protest in Portland; the camera was hitched up high, on a light pole, I think, or the corner of a tall fence. The lens was pointed down, offering a bird’s-eye view of an intersection, where it captured protesters marching, running, and chanting; there was never any commentary. Unlike videos shot by a reporter, a protester, or a bystander, Twitch footage seemed to hold no specific outlook; some videos came from accounts using pseudonyms, and there could be no way of knowing who had placed the camera. The experience of watching wasn’t quite the same as being there—the fixed position of the shot meant that my line of sight was reduced to whatever fit in the frame, so I couldn’t
turn to see what was happening, what was coming, what had passed. But it reminded me of a kind of viewing that I hadn’t thought about in a long time: public access television.
The earliest public access broadcasts appeared in the sixties, during that period of protest for Black liberation. In 1967, in response to “the long, hot summer” of unrest, Lyndon Johnson established the Kerner Commission, which determined, among other things, that the press disproportionately favored white perspectives; that year, Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act. But the true spirit of public television was forged before the government got involved: “It was programming produced prior to the passage of the 1967 act that better fit a progressive, ‘cutting edge’ description,” as Laura R. Linder wrote in Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox. Erik Barnouw,
the historian of American broadcasting, cited an early example: the Public Broadcast Laboratory, a newsmagazine show that debuted in 1967. “Mindful of its function as an alternative voice, it dipped into the work of fringe theaters, cabarets, and underground films, and inevitably reflected the angry subculture,” Barnouw wrote in The Image Empire. “The thrust of the message was anti-war, anti-racist, anti-establishment; the techniques, sometimes drawing on the absurdist theater, were strange and seemed outrageous to many television viewers.”
At the time, a new wave of Black media was proliferating. Black Journal and Say Brother, both newsmagazine programs, debuted in 1968; when the camera was positioned by Black people, for Black people, it allowed for discussion and examination of one’s own world without the interpretations of others. “Hard reports were gorgeously, patiently rendered, frequently trailing off onto a sensual plane,” as Doreen St. Félix wrote last summer for The New Yorker, when Black Journal became available to stream. William Greaves, the filmmaker and host of Black Journal, wrote for the New York Times, “For the Black producer, television will be just another word for jazz.”
The Public Broadcasting Service, funded by “viewers like you,” was established in 1969. Over the decades, an idealistic new genre of television emerged, one that was designed explicitly to serve the interests of a racially diverse public. Its shows were a vast array—some produced by local talking heads expounding on otherwise ignored subjects of community interest; some filmed inside halls of government, sans host, allowing Americans to witness their elected representatives at work. The result was by turns strange, unwatchable, and entertaining. Occasionally, it was momentous.
On the day C-SPAN debuted, in March 1979, three million American households tuned in to watch the House of Representatives in session. The broadcast began with the camera fixed on a door. A white-haired Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill—Democrat from Boston, then the Speaker of the House— emerged, eyeglasses in hand; he sauntered toward his podium and called the room to attention with the wrong end of a gavel: a tiny slip of impatience on display. The shot was tight, the picture grainy. James David Ford, the House chaplain, began the session with a short prayer. Al Gore, then a congressman from Tennessee, spoke next. “Television will change this institution, Mr. Speaker, just as it has changed the executive branch,” he said. “But the good will far outweigh the bad. From this day forward every member of this body must ask himself or herself, How many Americans are listening to the debates which are made?” It’s not exactly inspiring, from today’s vantage—all suits and neckties and formalities, background chatter and important people whose names you don’t remember, moving about. But the broadcast lifted a veil, granting access not merely to reporting or commentary about politics; viewers could see the enactment of it in real time.
As public broadcasting grew, this kind of footage became available across the country; local municipalities invited the general public to tune in to what had always been public meetings. The footage was not always as lively as, say, the BBC’s Question Time— the great British public show, on which prominent figures, including politicians, are asked questions by a studio audience of constituents. (“What do you think of what they’ve said?” the host asked a member of the early-years crowd. “Do you think they’re a lot of smug fuddy-duddies?”) Still, American public access television had an appealingly quirky sensibility, characterized by an earnest rejection of “news value.” (That is also what has made public broadcasting such a ripe target for pop culture ridicule, as on Saturday Night Live parodies like “Bronx Beat,” in which punditry is refracted through the characters of two moms complaining.)
Crucially, public access television seemed to strip away the veneer of commercial TV, which almost
always trained the camera on a tiny sliver of people: the white men who overwhelmingly served as producers, directors, and on-camera hosts. George C. Stoney, known as the father of public access television and a cofounder of NYU’s Alternative Media Center, advocated different priorities; through the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers, for instance, he lobbied for cable providers to share the broadcast spectrum with the general public, with the goal of using television for community building. In Public Access Television, Linder describes Stoney’s sensibility through a particular broadcast: a New York Times story had described Black and Latinx people in conflict; after a fight, the Alternative Media Center sent over an employee with a camera who, instead of interviewing police about what had happened, passed a microphone around to those who had been there. They reported what they knew, correcting
one another on the fly. “When the tape is through you have a feeling,” Stoney said, “not that you have learned exactly what happened the night before, but that you have learned so much about the dynamics of this neighborhood that you know it’s a neighborhood worth keeping.”
By the time I was growing up, in the nineties, public access television had come to represent, in my mind, a kind of unfiltered version of what I usually saw on air. I remember my dad watching C-SPAN, which struck me as radically different from network news, with its strange deadpan vocal intonations and blown-out hair. A lot of the time, nothing of particular interest was captured onscreen. But as I got older, the dawn of the internet allowed public access footage to achieve moments of notoriety that radiated far beyond the intended audience. Take the 2016 video of a town council meeting from a place called (no joke) White Settlement, Texas, that featured a debate on what to do about Browser, a cat who lived at the public library. A couple of council members spoke against keeping Browser around, citing allergies and renovations. But many more spoke in favor, sounding off on the history of cats in libraries; a little boy complained that he’d only gotten to pet Browser once. When, in spite of the community’s pleas, the council passed a motion evicting Browser, the video went viral. Thousands of letters from all over poured in to the mayor’s office, petitions circulated, and the council was forced to reverse its decision—during a session broadcast live on a streaming app called Periscope.
Eventually, the ubiquity of phone-cameras transformed our relationship to “public access” viewing. Those who have been historically shut out of politics—and of the political press—grew dissatisfied with watching news media that centered elected officials as the primary drivers of change. This discontented audience observed that progress, instead, has been catalyzed in the streets, in communities, through daily organizing; by the time a bill is being debated on the floor of the House, the news cameras are too late to capture the full arc of the story. By contrast, the dispatches streamed on Twitter, Instagram, and, especially, Twitch move the camera away from political officeholders and turn the focus on the people. The evolutionary offspring of public access broadcasting, this footage reflects a value system based on public empowerment—and the ways in which commercial news media fail to meet the needs of their audiences.
News outlets, which have traditionally directed much of their attention toward the halls of power, now find themselves with stiff competition; streaming gives viewers more directions in which to look. With endless images and videos at our constant disposal, people are entirely able to form their own understanding of events—and of the narrative choices involved in crafting newspaper articles and cable network broadcasts. If journalists deal in the currency of truth, and set limits as to who can obtain it, members of the public now have more resources with which to collect the facts for themselves, and they have found that the “truth” depends on who is doing the seeing, the asking, and the answering—and where.
Placing the camera in the hands of constituents delivers a new dimension of public access to perspectives that would otherwise remain unseen. Last year, for example, in Louisiana, the school board of East Baton Rouge Parish met to discuss the renaming of a public school honoring Robert E. Lee; Gary Chambers Jr., a local activist, came to speak in support of the renaming. While he waited for the public comment period to begin, he noticed Connie Bernard, a school board member, shopping for jackets on her laptop. He pulled out his phone, took a photo, and, when it was his turn to speak, held up the evidence to show the rest of the room. “I had intended to get up here and talk about how racist Robert E. Lee was, but I’m going to talk about you, Connie,” he said, his tone thick with righteous indignation. “Sitting over there shopping while
we’re talking about Robert E. Lee. This is a picture of you shopping while we’re talking about racism and history in this country.” Someone else at the meeting recorded the exchange, which was soon uploaded to the internet, where it made witnesses of us all: to the shopping; to Chambers’s frustration; to Bernard’s indifference, as she is seen walking out. The video quickly inspired a news cycle, a story told from the position of a source, inviting viewers not only to decide for themselves, but to feel for themselves, too.
Perhaps it’s impossible to ever get the whole picture of a story—how a narrative forms depends so heavily on the lens through which any one of us sees the world, our vantage points dictated at least partly by structures we had no hand in creating, by biases of which we are often unaware. To an extent, the camera of any individual is fixed in its position. Journalists inevitably come up against this challenge. But what if our goal, as producers of news coverage, wasn’t to revert, again and again, to the same angles, and instead to be coconspirators with those out of frame, to imagine a better future? What if our aim were not, actually, to answer questions, but to enable and inspire others to ask them—to place the camera somewhere new? Media that is truly for the public must be accessible to people in different, disparate places and commit itself to the exploration of alternative possibilities. It must investigate and explain, invite audiences in—and, when appropriate, it must step back. cjr
Chapter 3: How
Rethinking the means of production
Much of what makes journalism what it is, really, is how it’s made: the ethical standards, labor arrangements, reportorial methods, packaging, and distribution. Contracts must be agreed upon, terms with sources set. There are rules of engagement for filling one’s notebook, but tricky ethical questions inevitably arise; how a story comes together is, in many ways, as important as what it contains. So, too, is how journalism is presented: while one news item flashes in a pop-up alert, another may get lost—absorbed into the endless stream of digital “content” and rendered inaccessible to those who need to see it most. —The editors
