US Sen. Ed Markey says that a Trump administration plan to alter long-standing agreements governing cable access channels could pose an “existential threat” to community television in Massachusetts. In Boston, that could mean an assault on BNN-Media, the award-winning access system that has helped Bostonians plug into public affairs, neighborhood news, and entertainment while producing their own content for more than 40 years.
On Monday, Markey warned that the FCC is weighing a plan that would permit cable companies to recalculate the franchise fees they pay to cities like Boston for the right to operate in the city. The access stations are largely funded through these fees and the FCC’s new formula, according to Markey, would set up a “Sophie’s Choice” for municipalities like Boston and smaller towns as well, where access TV is a vital monitor of town meetings, elections and other civic events.
The new plan would permit cable operators to “assign a value to public, educational and governmental access (PEG) channels, and then subtract that value and the value of other in-kind contributions from the franchise fees they pay cities and towns,” according to State House News Service.
If the franchise fees were to be eliminated, Markey said, “local governments in Massachusetts and across the country would be forced to decide between supporting [these] channels and supporting other critical institutions serving the public good, like schools and public safety buildings.”
The senator framed the potential harm from the change – and the requisite fight to stop it – as “revolutionary. This is where the fight begins, and we’re going to spread this across the whole country, because at jeopardy is nothing less than democracy, nothing less than the voices of ordinary citizens in every single city and town in Massachusetts and the whole country, and we are in now for the fight,” Markey said, according to State House News Service.
In Boston, sapping the capacity of public access would compound what is already a serious void of coverage about municipal government and elections. Much of the larger media entities in Boston have been in steady retreat from hyper-local news about government and city elections for decades. BNN-Media— and particularly its flagship nightly news program, Neighborhood Network News, has been a bulwark against that news void. (Full disclosure: The Reporter has enjoyed a long partnership with NNN and our reporters frequently appear as correspondents on their programs.)
Shows like NNN and Joe Heisler’s Talk of the Neighborhoods, for example, are two of the few platforms that interview candidates for city council seats and other local elected positions that no longer get the attention of larger media organizations. Critically, BNN trains Boston residents to produce their own content for television in an attempt to make the cable channels as representative as possible.
Markey is right to sound the alarm. Bostonians who have benefited from the platform afforded by BNN-Media over the years should answer his call to action. Citizens should have more— not less— access to information about how their local government works.
– Bill Forry
