Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MR. SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Councilman Cohen. I do have testimony that I could share, if somebody would pick it up.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Yes.

MR. SCHWARTZ: And I'm also adding to this. I was concerned that this coalition -- my name is Ed Schwartz, and I'm here from the Institute for the Study of Civic Values.

I was concerned that our coalition didn't have the resources to buy you all lunch, so I thought that I -- I brought enough copies of the book I've written on the use of Internet for politics for whatever number of Councilpersons were actually going to be in the room. So you get at least --

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Would you please speak into the microphone.

MR. SCHWARTZ: I was saying that I was concerned that our coalition didn't have enough money to buy you all lunch for our presentations so I am sharing with a copy of a book I wrote a few years ago that's gotten a lot of attention on the use of the Internet for political and civic activism that is directly relevant to the testimony today, so you get at least something beyond my testimony.

In a hearing of the Public Property Committee yesterday, wired to rubber-stamp the acquisition of Greater Media Cable by Comcast -- and I wish that Comcast had wired our neighborhoods for cable modems as effectively as you wired that committee.

Comcast reiterated, as it did just now, that it was in full compliance with the City's requirements for public access. And I have on a legal basis, not being a lawyer, though, I suspect that the company is correct. Of course, in 1984, when Comcast was seeking initial support, Councilman Cohen, as you point out, when I shared a seat in Council with you and Angel Ortiz. When it was seeking our initial support, one had the impression that public access was a priority for this company, and clearly it is not.

Comcast, for example, owns QVC, the home shopping network. Now, that's a priority. It owns various local sports franchises here, another priority. It invests in a wide range of school programs, something of a priority for everyone in the telecommunications industry these days. It manages a Website called "Comcast At Home," which provides links to restaurants, entertainment, and shopping opportunities in various localities.

These are the priorities -- where the company invests some of its own $1.374 billion each quarter in revenues that were reported each year. Clearly, using cable to promote civic participation and to help citizens expand their influence in the political process simply is not on this list of priorities.

So what Comcast and Wade, I assume, are saying is that they will remain in compliance with the City's public access requirements -- I wrote this a couple of hours ago and you've just heard testimony reiterating this in great detail -- but that it is up to the City itself to stipulate what these requirements are. So we are here today to assert that the City is out of compliance with its own requirements.

And I speak here not just as a bystander to this process. But as I said yesterday, as one who voted to award cable franchises to Comcast and to Wade within the context of a public access ordinance passed by City Council in the Council prior to my term and signed by the mayor that did stipulate the precise in which the cable companies were and the City were to proceed in this area -- and you've just heard a list of those requirements read to you by Mr. Pardini. As you well know, the ordinance called for the creation of this corporation, and its operations were to be funded as you've just heard.

All of that was quite clear in 1984 when Council and Mayor Goode finally agreed which cable franchises would be given the awards to operate here, and none of this has happened.

Among the many reasons that most people are utterly turned off by politics in this country, and perhaps recently in this city, is that even if you lobby, even if you get a law passed, if those in power are not interested in enforcing it, it won't happen. And here's a prime example.

I spent hours, as you may recall, on that Council, wrestling with this problem of cable. And given what's happened since, I look back at it now as being a tremendous waste of my time.

I admit, however, as you, Councilman Cohen, are intimating in some of the things that you've said, that a major reason that none of this has happened is that it has not been a priority perhaps within even the civic arena. We have a chicken-egg problem here. On the one hand, people in groups all over the place clamor to get on television.

But since public access channels are largely buried, these don't count. So if no one sets up a decent public access system, with adequate funding to provide quality broadcasting to citizen groups, such as you've heard described in the hearing this afternoon, people don't know what they're missing.

But when you think about it, who demanded a home shopping network or infomercials, which are now powerful tools for business? Who demanded something called "the 700 Club" that Pat Robertson has used to build the Christian Coalition in this country? Who would have thought that something called "talk radio" would become a major vehicle for the American right, as it took control of both houses of Congress? No one demanded any of this. But now that they are available, they play an important role in the collective life of this society.

And to add one more, when I started talking about something called "the Internet" back in 1994, people looked at me as if I had been watching too many episodes the X Files. But in just five years, companies, organizations, schools, and thousands of individual citizens are scrambling to go on line, to use e-mail, and to set up Websites of their own. Again, no one demanded the Internet, but once people have seen the opportunities that it creates for us, they have rushed to take advantage of them.

So why should we be revisiting public access now, 15 years after the ordinance was passed? Even I confess that I haven't been involved particularly in this cause over the years, despite my own support for the principle, so why now? In part for me, it relates to the seismic change that is taking place in the telecommunications and broadcasting industry right now that is transforming the way in which we connect to each other and to what is called "the public square."

Public access no longer simply means cable television; it also means the Internet. It already means the ability to set up a TV camera in your study and broadcast to TV sets all over the country. It means integrating a TV show with interactive e-mail with an audience. These are the tools of extraordinary power if grass-roots organizations are given the opportunity to use them.

But if the broadcast companies like Comcast establish their own proprietary Websites, which block out what civic and grass-roots and political groups are doing and then use their broadcast stations to advertise them, as Comcast is doing, then once again, ordinary citizens will be relegated to insignificance within the overall scheme of what the media is offering.

It's taken just four years for nine of the ten major Internet portals, as they're called, points of access to other Websites, be run by major multinational corporations. Once again, citizens and citizen groups are in danger of being pushed aside by institutions that couldn't care less whether we exert any influence or not.

And so, as I tried to suggest at yesterday's hearing before the Chair got tired of listening, to me, the issue, as was said on this floor, is democracy. Mass media has done more to transform our democratic process from one in which politicians seek public office through personal contacts with voters to one in which you either advertise or you lose. And all the hand-wringing about the growing expense of campaigns and the role of big money in this process is simply the by-product of the mass media electoral system.

Here you all are, members of a City Council who have run for office through a political party system that required you to reach out to wards and committee people and community groups but that did not even allow you really to advertise. And so what have you had to raise in your campaigns? At most, 100 to $200,000. When I ran, I raised maybe 40 or $50,000 to win a Democratic primary in a city with 325,000 voters. And at the primary, it was 135,000.

Now, compare that to our most mayoral primary where, by January 1999, you either had to raise at least $1.5 million or you weren't in the race. And there are now projections that each candidate in the general election will have to raise between 4 and $6 million. That won't be used for travel to meetings, it won't be used for street money, it won't even be used for mass mailings; it will be used almost entirely for advertising on a handful of channels that now reach most people most of the time and, thereby, define what's significant in politics what isn't.

But what if we had built a media system over the past 15 years where there were more than just three or four local channels that everyone watched? What if the City channel actually broadcast not merely Council meetings, but public hearings instead of just providing a static stalk bulletin board of upcoming events and job openings. What if we had developed a local C-Span covering conferences all over town? What if public access gave each of you an opportunity to host your own shows, and political organizations the opportunity to reach out to the public around issues of concern to them?

And now that we do have the Internet at our disposal, what if Comcast and the other cable companies made a serious effort to work with citizen groups and elected officials to build a system that integrates communications via e-mail and the Web with broadcasting through conventional means? Would we then be stuck with just three or four channels that reach everyone, costing millions of dollars for people who want to enter the electoral process even to be able to use, while channel after channel on our sets are being largely unused for any useful purpose?

This is about democracy, it's about making this media work to bring people together and to bring elected officials closer to the people. Film studios like Disney do, indeed, spend billions in their efforts to entertain us on television. Corporations live or die by their advertising. Schools are now trying in their own way to make cable and the Internet work for education.

But if you and the people who run this city and the mayor, who have achieved leadership in politics, aren't prepared to fight for this new medium to become a force for democracy, if the positions you take in the face of the merger yesterday and public access corporations are, go ahead, do with these channels what you will, and do with us and the people whom we represent what you will on these airwaves when we grant you control over the channels without public access. Then who will fight to make this medium work for democracy? If our leading practitioners of democracy aren't prepared to fight for it, then is it any wonder that democracy appears to be dying?

There are those who now say that the question of providing public access in Philadelphia is dead, that there's no interest in it, and that we should move on to other things. I contend that public access is more urgently needed now than at anytime within the past 30 years.

(Applause.)

MR. SCHWARTZ: We have a brief, brief, moment here in the evolution of technology that allows ordinary citizens to have a chance to make a difference by turning the cameras and the Websites and the e-mail broadcasting systems around and speaking truth to power. But soon the forces of centralization and concentration that are right now working overtime to consolidate their control over our access to the information about what we're doing will make it virtually impossible for anyone to break in or to find anything that they're really looking for.

Perhaps grass-roots, civic, religious, labor, and political groups haven't made these connections now so they're not fully in this fight. But as you, Councilman Cohen, point out, there are more people here than perhaps have been here before, and a larger group is beginning to make the connections and discover how important this is to our collective futures, and I am among them.

So I say to you that we will continue to build the support that you were asking us to built because I believe that this, you know, is a critical issue in the life of democracy for the City and for the country. And I do thank this committee for holding this hearing and giving us an opportunity to air these concerns publicly in a way that they desperately need to be heard.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

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