Cable Television and the Public Interest By: Patricia Aufderheide

In this article Patricia gave a perspective on cable television and how it may have helped or changed the community as a whole. Cable television is a channel made to raise questions of the public interest in telecommunications, it has become the primary delivery medium for television in a majority of American homes. The cable communications Policy Act was passed back in 1984 with few to none public participation, no cable operator agreed with this law and physically did not have the extra money to produce a cable television channel. When the law was first in effect it had many problems like bad enforcement, sloppy language, and confusion over the First Amendment rights. In this article Patricia also mentioned how “cable today has no thriving marketplace of ideas” meaning that what we see on television is always the same and ruled by advertising programs, what we really need is a diversity of sources and viewpoints about the different issues that needs to be raised in our public concern. The access cable is made to give the public news about the public and Patricia said that the access cable should not be measured with the amount of viewers but the ability to make a difference in the community, and should not be treated like any other American public television does. Access cable is used to broadcast government and educational channels such as city council meetings, school board meetings, local high school basketball games, religious programming or community billboard. This may sound like they did an OK job with such little support but throughout the time public access has been under assault in many ways. Cable companies and cities under financial pressure are both assaulting public access because the price to have the channel is way too high for them to afford but the law has been passed that they must provide that channel for their community. The access cable did exceptionally well for the lack of professional staff and the amount of assault they received, but at the end they still managed to hang on and pulled through the rough times because as we can see today there are still channels where local games and news are broadcasted.