Public-access groups want TV time on Philly cable
By The Associated Press
03.25.02
PHILADELPHIA — If Wayne and Garth can get on television in Aurora, Ill., lawyer Sam Stretton doesn't understand why the Green Party, the National Organization for Women and a Wharton School professor can't make it onto community-access TV in Philadelphia.
Watched by few, and lampooned famously in the Saturday Night Live skit, "Wayne's World," community-access TV in other cities is the realm of local political gossip, student broadcasters and countless voter forums.
Philadelphia, however, doesn't have a cable-access channel.
Stretton and a group dubbed the Philadelphia Community Access Coalition filed suit in federal court March 21 to force the city to act on a 1983 ordinance that was supposed to make five cable channels and studios available at low-cost to amateur programmers and political groups.
Stretton said the programming may not be glossy, but it's vital for free speech.
"That is the modern way speech and issues are debated," he said. "The days of standing on a street corner or renting a flat bed truck to express your viewpoint are long gone."
Buying expensive advertising time on commercial television is beyond the means of most groups, he said, so public access has to fill the void.
"It's a wonderful thing in cities that have it, and there is no reason why Philadelphia shouldn't have it as well," he said.
A 19-year-old city ordinance called for the creation of the Philadelphia Public Access Corp. to govern the public-access system, but the corporation was never established.
The city also has provisions for cable-access TV in its licensing deal with Comcast cable, but has never enforced them, making Philadelphia the largest U.S. city without a public-access cable channel, the suit said.
More than a dozen plaintiffs have joined the suit, including the local chapter of NOW, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the Critical Path AIDS Project, the Philadelphia Unemployment Project and the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force.
University of the Arts communications professor Keith Brand, filmmaker Louis Massiah and Edward S. Herman, a professor emeritus of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, have also added their names to the suit.
The suit names Mayor John F. Street and City Council President Anna C. Verna among the defendants.
Street's office declined comment on the suit. City officials have previously cited a lack of money and the risk of providing a forum for hate groups as reasons for not implementing public-access cable.