Struggling to survive

Never one to disappoint, Alex Davy's May 7, 2008 Lillie Newspapers article Bad Signals: Public access television under siege is a useful take on one aspect of emerging media, especially given the history of public access television in Maplewood

Call it You Tube 0.0. While the "Internet" was still confined to a handful of linked supercomputers controlled by the Department of Defense, public access television was already revolutionizing the spread of information.

"It's the democratization of media," says Ted Arbeiter, director of operations at Suburban Community Channels (SCC) in White Bear Lake. "Instead of programming in the hands of the few, it's in the hands of the many."

With the widespread introduction of cable television in the early 1970s came a new federal mandate, trading the publicly owned space companies require to lay wires for exclusive channels that provide free air time to anyone who wants it.

Local stations were set up across America to supply studio space, equipment and training, staffed by industry professionals and funded through franchising fees paid by the cable companies.

In a stroke, the barriers to information dissemination were obliterated. Bypassing the gatekeepers of traditional media, citizens were able to directly address the community at large.

But now, threatened by media deregulation and dwarfed in popularity by video-sharing web sites, public access television is struggling to survive.