It was an unusual picket line. About 20 people had arrived at the offices of the Chicago Access Corporation, CAC, to protest the showing of a cable talk show, Race and Reason, hosted by a rabid white supremacist named Thomas Metzger. Three members of a local group called the Committee for Labor Access entered the building and came out with one of CAC’s portable video cameras; they began interviewing participants in the protest, which by now had grown to more than 50 people.
Everyone who subscribes to cable television in Chicago automatically receives CAC’s programming. Whether your check goes to Group W Cable or Chicago Cable TV, you get, at no extra charge: Channel 21, educational programming coordinated by the Board of Education; Channel 27, a sort of screen-text bulletin board of public announcements; Channel 42, an “interactive” service that runs short programs on such topics as astrology, jokes, and how to be an election judge in response to viewers’ telephone requests; and, most popular and visible of all (though not all that visible), Channel 19, the one that comes closest to “real” TV (sometimes not all that close). There are six CAC channels in all; Channel 36 is not yet in service, and Channel 51 is currently “on loan” to Group W.
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After a lengthy period of study including three months of public hearings (it was the “most thorough and extensive” cable inquiry in the country, according to the report), the commission presented its recommendations to Mayor Jane Byrne and Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, chairman of the City Council’s subcommittee on cable TV, in January 1982. Douglass W. Cassel Jr., an attorney for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, who helped write the report, says that the City Council adopted “95 percent of the recommendations we made.” As a result, Chicago has five cable franchise areas, each of which can be run by a separate company; for the initial 15-year contract period, Group W has three areas and Chicago Cable TV two. There are also regulatory and enforcement structures–a city Cable Commission and an Office of Cable Communications–and an independent, not-for-profit public-access corporation, CAC, which is funded by the cable corporations to the tune of about $6 million over the initial 15 years. The cable study commission, well aware that a number of national corporations wanted to bid for the Chicago franchises–where a potential 500,000 households might be willing to pay a national average of about $275 per year for cable service–made funding a public-access system one of the prerequisites for even bidding on the Chicago contracts. The $6 million is much less than the commission initially envisioned, but the deal that Chicago finally made still compares quite favorably with public-access systems in other major cities. Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, Atlanta, and a number of others have but one or two public-access channels each, and they are controlled by the cable companies instead of being independent. Many of the above cities have little funding for training purposes and no public-access studio or no three-quarter-inch portable cameras. Only Boston, which served as a model for Chicago’s access system, has anything comparable.
To broadcast your program on commercial TV in Chicago is probably impossible; no program director will relinquish a half-hour slot on any part of his or her schedule “for any price, with the exception of political campaigns,” as one stated. Time is available for short commercial slots; though salespeople will not quote an exact rate except to advertisers, it’s clear that 30 seconds of VHF prime time in Chicago can cost from $1,000 to $13,000.
Thus, when producers and staff complain that eight portable cameras are not enough to serve the growing number of access users, they are told that the budget will not allow new purchases. Yet anyone who asks to see the budget, to examine how CAC has spent the $3.5 million that it’s supposed to have received thus far from the city’s agreement with the franchise winners, is told that the books are not open. Though visitors are allowed at CAC board meetings, the directors recently voted to ban the videotaping of those sessions. Cassel, among others, opposed this vote. One board member found it ironic that Channel 19 would cablecast all seven and a half hours of the City Council session to select an acting mayor, yet would not put its own meetings on the air once a month.
