Paying for Access

Chicago Reader

Published September 24, 2004

By Mike Miner

On September 29 the City Council's scheduled to vote on diverting $2 million in cable franchise fees to Chicago Access Network Television to keep public-access TV alive and healthy in Chicago. CAN TV has its aldermanic champions. But there isn't much loose change at City Hall this year, and Mayor Daley has made it clear he doesn't like the idea.

When CAN TV was created in 1982, Chicago's cable franchise holders were required by contract to pay it large annual fees. But one of the franchisees, RCN, declared bankruptcy this past August; it owed CAN TV $1.275 million and was obligated to pay it another $300,000 by the end of 2004. That's money executive director Barbara Popovic can't afford to kiss off -- her 2004 budget is only $2.4 million. She says she'll have to drastically slash her operation if she can't find a new revenue stream. At the moment CAN TV operates five cable channels and broadcasts 140 hours of local programming a week.

Public-access television is a virtue that doesn't automatically explain itself. Hoping to get across to the city how important CAN TV is, Popovic tells the story of Frank Latin.

He's a statistical researcher for the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Two years ago he decided to start a newspaper, Nitty Gritty News. His idea was a free monthly paper that would be distributed in neighborhoods across Chicago, spotlighting a different neighborhood each month but focusing on issues, such as schools and affordable housing, that were common to them all. He says he's found a readership but advertisers have been another story.

On September 19, when he happened to be at the CAN TV studio to be interviewed, Latin was feeling discouraged. "The frustrating part," he says, "is these groups and organizations and foundations that claim to be about the stated purpose. You almost have to know somebody. Everybody loves the project, but when it comes to funding they have some excuse."

When the interview was wrapped up, CAN TV began taping a tribute to the late Lu Palmer. "I'm in my early 30s," says Latin. "I was familiar with the name, but I didn't know the significance of Lu Palmer and the work he did." Curious, he hung around, and as black community elders told stories about Palmer's life in journalism and politics Latin got excited. He found out that at one point Palmer was so frustrated working for other publishers that he started a paper of his own. "It hit me, like whoa, maybe you are doing something," he says. A CAN TV producer came up to him and said, "Listen man, you've got to be one of those guys who continue to beat the drum."

Latin decided to write a story on CAN TV, and the next day he came back and interviewed Popovic. He told her he'd walked out revitalized. It might have been happenstance that CAN TV was where Latin had his epiphany, but Popovic is willing to take a piece of the credit.

Mary Rickard, a CAN TV publicist, wants to make the same case. She's now touting a passage in a book she just read, an influential book published 42 years ago called Four Theories of the Press. The background to this passage is a story in itself.

As this story goes, at an Encyclopaedia Britannica board meeting in the early 40s Henry Luce, the young editor of Time, passed a note to Robert Hutchins, the young president of the University of Chicago. It said, "How do I find out about the freedom of the press and what my obligations are?" Hutchins told Luce he didn't know. And Luce said, "Well, why don't we set up a commission on freedom of the press and find out what it is?"

So they did. Luce funded it, Hutchins chaired it, and philosophers such as William Hocking, theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, and poets such as Archibald MacLeish sat on it. No journalists were asked. Surely, Hutchins commented, the newspaper business isn't "so esoteric that intelligent men outside it cannot understand it."

The Hutchins Commission covered a lot of ground that has been covered many times since, never to any avail. They haggled over whether ultimate control of the press should rest with government, publishers, or a private board of concerned citizens, and each alternative seemed worse than the others. The cultural deficits of both the press and the public were noted and brooded over.

But sparks of wisdom were struck, and 16 years later one of these sparks inspired the authors of Four Theories of the Press: "The [Hutchins] Commission is concerned not just about freedom of those who own the media; it is also concerned about citizens who possess a merely negative freedom of expression. Freedom of the press, the Commission argues, is a somewhat empty right for the person who lacks access to the mass media. His freedom, too, must be implemented -- by a press which carries viewpoints similar to his own; by media operated by government or nonprofit agencies to provide him with the required services which the commercial press does not provide."

The word "access" jumped out at Rickard with all its modern meaning -- not simply as a citizen's opportunity to receive information but also as an opportunity to provide it. She wrote in the book's margin, "CAN TV."

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