Published Feb. 21, 2006 by AM New York

BY MICHAEL CLANCY
amNEWYORK CITY EDITOR
February 21, 2006

From the strangest street theater to the driest of city council committee hearings, the weird and wild world of cable access TV should be familiar to most New Yorkers who've ever had a bout of insomnia or flipped around the TV dial.

But a clash in Washington between big phone companies and giant cable providers might silence the council and other cable access staples such as the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping and the Black Israelites.

Public Access also has launched the careers of the infamous sex-show host Robin Byrd and Max Kellerman, the cable TV sports-show host who had a show as a teen on Manhattan Neighborhood Networks.

People who present their TV shows on MNN, Brooklyn Cable Access Television and other such systems nationwide could be silenced if and when cable TV is made available on a nationwide franchising basis. Nationwide, some 1.2 million volunteers and 250,000 community groups who produce the grassroots programming could be blacked out.

" There's an African proverb that says 'When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled,'" said Anthony Riddle of the Alliance of Community Media, a group dedicated to preserving public access nationwide.

Phone companies argue that the 30,000 franchise agreements that cable companies have negotiated with municipalities are simply too burdensome. It's those franchise agreements that give municipalities leeway in negotiations because cable companies use public right of way to run their lines. Cities and towns get a chunk of cable revenue and bandwidth as part of those agreements.

But the system has been shaken by rapid technological change. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has been rendered nearly obsolete by high-speed Internet connections. In short, the law must be and will be changed -- the question is how, and that outcome will shape the fate of public access TV.

A culture under threat

It would be easy to dismiss public access television as simply a repository of the weird just because its programming is as strange and diverse as the population of New York.

Yet for every aspiring rapper, aging stripper or low-brow wannabe sitcom actor appearing on public channels, there are the community activists, preachers or aspiring artists who produce their own shows.

That's not to say the weird doesn't have its own intrinsic value.

" Just showing people that television doesn't have to be this cookie-cutter thing," said Rick Jungers, of Manhattan Neighborhood Networks, "that it doesn't always have to promote crass commercialism, that in itself has value."

What's more, proponents of public access note, the programming better reflects the city's diversity.

"Public access ets stuck with the image of 'Wayne's World,'" said Denis Moynihan, the outreach director of Democracy Now!, the radio show that's been able to branch out to 48 states through public access channels. "If you watch carefully, you'll see that you are seeing immigrant communities, people of color and those who have been largely shut out of the corporate media systems make up the majority of the programming."

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.