Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MS. RIEDEL: Thank you very much. I'd like to thank the Philadelphia City Council for having me come to testify.

My name is Bunnie Riedel, R-I-E-D-E-L. I'm Executive Director of the Alliance for Community Media, a national nonprofit membership organization which, for almost 25 years, has educated and advocated on behalf of public educational and government access.

I represent about 2,000 media access centers around the country and over 5,000 television channels nationwide dedicated to public education government access. I represent more channel capacity than all the presidents of the networks and PBS combined, and I am proud to say that I am the lowest paid television executive in America.

Our member centers provide over one million hours of locally-originated television programming each year. They range in size, the member centers do, from a couple of spare rooms in a basement of a school or a church or a full-service television studio which is hard to distinguish from the television studios of network affiliates. And their budgets, which are oven often dependent on the number of subscribers in any franchise area, range from a few thousand dollars to several million dollars.

Community media centers have varying capabilities. Some produce only television, while other produce also community radio and they're Internet service providers. They electronically link the community institutions, such as hospitals and schools and libraries and museums, with one another and the public at large. Some of them satellite up-link/down-link capabilities, and many have mobile van units for remote feeds. Most of them provide bulletin boards for use by community organizations and institutions. And every public access center around this country has anywhere from a few to several hundred community volunteers attached to it.

Throughout this country, community media is growing by leaps and bounds. The Alliance, our organization, serves as a professional training organization for communities seeking to establish access. One of our most popular publications is our Cable Access Start-Up Manual, which guides a community step by step through the process of starting access.

In a few weeks, we'll be hosting our international conference in Cincinnati. At that conference, almost 600 people will spend three and a half days attending over 70 workshops and preliminary sessions on subjects ranging from distance-learning via television to building bridges in your community, to advanced Internet issues, to government access models for success.

We will host our 22nd Annual Hometown Video Festival Awards, which has more than 1600 entrants from the United States and Canada. This is the oldest video festival in America.

At our conference will be representatives from the Department of Education, Housing and Urban Development, NASA, the Halcyon Foundation, the National Construction Safety Council, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisers, the National and Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration, and the editor of Communications Daily, one of the most respected trade publications in America.

Additionally, we are bringing in international guests from Korea, Brazil, South Africa, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Sweden, and India. We're working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to get the neighborhood networks into our access centers around the country to establish computer labs in public access centers.

We recently received an award from Vice President Al Gore for our partnership with the Department of Education and our role in their nationally-televised satellite town meetings. A couple of weeks ago, we assisted the White House in getting its Forum on Mental Health on public access channels across the country. Not cable, not the networks, not PBS were willing to carry this program, but public access said yes.

I've just told you these things about what it is we do singly and collectively because when I met with the Mayor's office last month, the Deputy Mayor treated me like I didn't know what I was talking about. He repeatedly said that one-third of our programming on public access is either hate or pornographic. He treated me like I'm some part of a fringe group.

I tell you that I am not. I am proud of access, all three pillars of access -- educational, governmental, and public.

(Applause.)

MS. RIEDEL: I've brought with me letters of thanks written to access, public access centers around the country, from individuals and organizations thanking them for their work. Some notables are Senators Barbara Boxer and Don Regal, Representatives Albert Wynn and Anna Eshue (ph.), Governors Paris Glendenning (ph.) of Maryland, and John Ingler of Michigan.

I also would like to submit -- or have submitted a letter written by Bernard Stone, who is Vice Mayor and Alderman in Chicago, urging Philadelphia to establish what is long overdue: public access. And I'd like to submit -- I've got a few copies, and you can pass them around or I'll make copies.

(Applause.)

MS. RIEDEL: The 1998 annual report of the Chicago Access Corporation, a public access corporation that serves the city of Chicago, has a $2 million a year budget, produces 6,000 hours of locally-originated programming each and every year, and has five -- not one, not two, but five public access channels dedicated to public access.

I say to you that a community, any community -- I'm trying to make you jealous of Chicago, by the way. I say that a community without public access is a community that is sorely disadvantaged. We live in a world that deafens us with marketing. Last year, the average person was exposed to a million advertisements. In 1991, there were nine and a half minutes of commercials per every hour of television. In 1998, there were 16 minutes.

Along with being commercially-free, public access is the one place where images rarely seen in the mainstream media can be seen, images such as the following:

Old people, people of color, people with disabilities, people with accents or who speak another language, people who are less than attractive, respectful teenagers, good cops, African-American men who don't play football or basketball, Asian women who aren't deferential, Hispanic entrepreneurs, children who act their age, gays who are not caricatures, faithful husbands and wives, really terrific inlaws, and -- my personal all-time favorite -- middle-aged women with pot bellies, crows feet, and lots the self-esteem.

(Applause.)

MS. RIEDEL: Our nation is engaged in a discussion right now about the detrimental effects of violence in the media. I am proud to say that public access does not contribute to media violence. It doesn't take the "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" mentality of the broadcasting cable networks. Public access gives people information, life-enhancing, community- building information.

Rather than cover car wrecks, we cover art festivals and symphony performances. Rather than chase ambulances, we chase nonprofit organizations such as the United Way, Muscular Dystrophy Association, the League of Women Voters, and the Chamber of Commerce. Rather than showing you shoot-outs, we show you AARP, the VFW, NAACP, PFLAG.

We are not Fox, we are not the Playboy Channel, we are not hours and hours of mindless sitcoms. In fact, public access has been accused of being rather pedestrian and boring. How nice.

(Applause.)

MS. RIEDEL: I don't know about you, but I like pedestrian and I like boring. I like a deep examination of issues rather than eight-second sound bites. I like bringing a community together rather than tearing them apart. I like discussion rather than fist fights.

In a world that is so frequently out of control, public access puts power into people's hands. It makes them active participants in media rather than passive recipients of it.

I know that there are community groups and individuals here today that want public access. They want a place in Philadelphia that serves as an electronic library, where they can reach the citizens of Philadelphia directly with information and services. They want media that's about their organizations, their cities, their neighborhoods, and their sidewalks.

Public access is the electronic green space of a community. It is where people meet one another and greet. It chronicles who we are and where we are.

This instrument was agreed to over 15 years ago. The promise is long overdue. The objection to its implementation is hollow and empty.

It is time that the people of Philadelphia have what the people of Chicago; New York; Portland; Rochester; Erie; Knoxville; Salina, Kansas; Santa Rosa, California; and Manchester, New Hampshire have.

(Applause.)

COUNCILMAN ORTIZ: And Reading Pennsylvania.

MS. RIEDEL: Establish public access in Philadelphia. Trust the people of this city to do what people across the country and indeed the world are doing: using media to build community.

Thank you for your time.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. RIEDEL: If you want to watch some fabulous access public access tapes, 'cause I understand you watched some not-so-fabulous public access tapes not so long ago. If you want to watch the, I've brought you our Hometown Video Festival. These are the winners that we pick from across the country, and there's great stuff in there, and I give them to the entire Council to use as you will.

And that's my testimony.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Thank you.

I would just like to raise this question -- not addressed to any particular speaker but really addressed to everybody who feels they have information. Who are the forces -- in Philadelphia, who are the forces that are opposed to public access and why?

MS. RIEDEL: Well, I have hearsay. Do you want hearsay or --

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Well, that's the question we have to deal with.

MS. RIEDEL: I don't know. I watched testimony that you had here a while ago and I was a bit confused as to why it hadn't happened and who was opposed to it. I think there's a lot of factors probably involved, and that is because it's so long gone, that now getting the ball rolling is probably somewhat scary 'cause you're 15 years overdue on the ordinance.

But I don't know. I'm guessing there's probably some blame that could be spread all the way around. I don't know. I do know that my --

COUNCILMAN COHEN: I'll tell you factually that the first step that would be needed would be the development of a corporation. The legal papers were prepared and were presented to Mayor Wilson Goode. That's back in 1983. They stayed on his desk, nothing seemed to be able to move him to act. The same thing has occurred with respect to every mayor that has since been in office.

And so we're seeking information as to why that exists. The treatment that -- let me apologize for the treatment that you were subjected to by the deputy mayor, whoever he may have been. The mayor has many deputy mayors.

MS. RIEDEL: His Communications Director, I guess. Kevin Feeley?

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Well, probably so. Because I've never heard such nonsense with respect to a reason as to why the City doesn't move forward on public access.

They do profess to be supportive of it but then immediately launch into the grounds that the existing public access is full of pornographic material and hate material, the same thing that you talked about.

I'm wondering if anybody has information or has views as to why there is this opposition and where it stems from. We'd like to hear it as part of the record and I'm hoping that Professor Herman may have some thoughts on that.

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