Public access TV? Not anymore in KC Time Warner takeover results in loss of last community-oriented outlet

Here's one channel that won't be coming to Time Warner Cable anytime soon: ours.

When Time Warner Cable took over TCI of Overland Park's operations Aug. 31, few people seemed to notice, or care, that it shut down TCI's Channel 15B, the last attempt by an area cable company to produce community-oriented TV shows.

Public access television - TV by the viewers and for the viewers - hasn't been heard from much around here since the early 1980s, when hundreds of volunteers learned to operate cameras, run control boards and edit video at American Cablevision's $ 275,000 public access facilities. They created shows that made a point rather than a profit, shows as unpretentious as their titles: "The Elderly," "Getting Help," "Women in Jazz." Along with millions of others across the country, these public access pioneers thought that TV, once the great isolator of Americans, might be used to knit communities together.

And in hundreds of other communities that idea continues to find a home. But not here. Cyd Slayton, who directed American Cablevision's community programs in 1980 and 1981, remembers staying up countless nights with producers, shooting and editing tape. "These volunteers were so excited about the ability to raise community issues on television, without pay, without even recognition," Slayton says. Viewers could watch art students creating video montages, physicians lecturing on health care, senior citizens chatting about aging.

But locally and nationally, the novelty began to wear off. Interest in American Cablevision's public access channel in Kansas City already had faded 10 years ago when a hate group showed up wanting to do a show. Then-councilman Emanuel Cleaver led a charge to take the channel off the air. It didn't entirely succeed, but later, as mayor, Cleaver saw to it that public access was written out of the city's cable franchise.

"I liken it to the Internet," says Carol Rothwell, the longtime public affairs director for American Cablevision, which joined with TCI of Overland Park and is now called Time Warner Cable. "People get so excited - 'Oh, let's get on the Web. Let's get e-mail. ' Then they get bored and move onto something else. The idea had its time, but that was in the '70s, possibly the '80s."

Meanwhile, in the '90s and about a two-hour drive west, it's a different story. In Salina, Kan., a city of 43,000, public access is more than an experiment in cable. It's the one TV station residents can call their own. Access Salina airs at least seven hours of programs every night. More than 100 volunteers this year will produce hundreds of hours of new shows, from talk to performance to religious to the eclectic.

On a Wednesday evening you might find Eloise Lynch and her crew of seniors doing a live broadcast. Her program, "Oh Say," is the kind of community-service talk show a typical commercial TV station would hide in some early-Sunday-morning time slot. On Access Salina, it airs in prime time. "I can't believe Kansas City doesn't have a community access station," the show's director, John Chalmers, says when told the news. "You could have a better station than any of the commercial stations there."

It's easy to point to the disparity between media-rich Kansas City and media-thin Salina, which has no local network affiliates and receives all its television from Topeka and Kansas City. But the most crucial difference between the two cities may be organizational. Kansas City's public access facility was owned by the cable company. Salina, like many cities with successful public access, set up a nonprofit entity to run its channel. Access Salina doesn't take the heat when there is a cable outage or rates go up. And since it essentially acts like any other nonprofit arts group, recruiting actively in the community and building good will, it has been able to weather the storms caused by controversial shows.

That didn't happen in Kansas City in 1988 when a local white supremacist group announced its plans to create a public access show on American Cablevision. After Cleaver led a 9-2 City Council vote to kill public access, he declared that Kansas City had put itself "on a mountain of visibility because we dare to say 'no.' " He was right.

To this day the tale of Kansas City is taught in public access training seminars across the country as a case in how not to handle controversy. "It wasn't the Klan that was the problem. It was the well-meaning councilmen who are African-Americans like me," says Anthony Riddle, who directs New York City's vast public access facility. "You don't want to stop the Ku Klux Klan from speaking. You want to stop them from setting up paramilitary camps in the woods."

"Intellectually, I agree with that kind of lofty reasoning," Mayor Cleaver says now. "But there are still many, many individuals who need only mild encouragement to release their racist attitudes on an unsuspecting public."

Kansas City still has a government channel which, unlike public access, has flourished, thanks in part to $ 400,000 in new equipment from the cable company. And as Rothwell points out, it's not like you can't still produce a show for Time Warner. There are, however, a few catches: You'll have to pay for the airtime. The show will air on Time Warner's Channel 4 when infomercials aren't running. The cable company may demand you take out the same $ 1 million insurance policy it requires of the infomercial makers. And because Time Warner's studios aren't open to the public, you'll have to provide equipment and a place to tape.

Remarkably, a few local producers still turn out shows despite these obstacles. Perhaps the most ambitious are Taju and Aquilla Tubbs, who have now begun airing a daily hour of Kansas City jazz and blues. It's seen on Time Warner's Channel 4 at the untimely hour of 8 a.m.

The irony is that the Tubbses - whose show promotes the integrated local music scene - have to pay to be on TV because the city decided a free channel posed a threat to racial harmony. Taju Tubbs says he has sponsors lined up to pay him to do his shows full time (and, he says, Time Warner dropped the insurance requirement after he protested). But he's done public access TV in other cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Atlanta, and wishes it could be done here as well.

"If the people don't have a means of expression, then we're letting the corporations speak for us," Tubbs says. "Then we don't have what this blues and jazz show is all about - freedom of spirit."