Page 184 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

In Europe, local community television movements reached their first
peak with the citizen-driven television broadcasting experiments of the
1970s. Great Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands were at the fore-
front in experimenting with community television (Hollander 1992, 11).
So-called public access channels were aimed at providing alternative
news production and neighborhood-oriented agenda setting to enable
and facilitate civic engagement on the local public stage. In Germany,
the first open channel was established relatively late in 1984 within
8
the framework of a temporarily and spatially limited pilot project. In
1994,eightGermanstatesaltogetherhousedtwenty-sevenopenchannels
withaweeklyairtimebetweentwoandfifty-sixhours.In2003,thatnum-
ber slightly increased to seventy-nine channels, reflecting the tendencyin
Western European metropolitan communities to invest in government-
sponsored public-access channels (http://www.openchannel.se/cat/
overview/htm). The Open Channel Organization in 2003 provided
links to about 6,000 open-access television stations worldwide – the
United States with an estimated 1,800 channels again being at the
forefront. A study by the California Center for Civic Renewal an-
alyzing the California public-access market between 1993 and 2000
came to the conclusion that government-sponsored public-access tele-
vision “has been the single greatest contributor to positively increas-
ing public participation in local government decision-making in the
last decade” (Conklin 2000). In 1989, local governments in California
spent about $3.9 million to support government-access channels; in
2000, these investments had increased to about $15 million (Conklin
2000).
InEurope,localgovernmentsarenotquiteaswillingtosupportexpen-
sive communication technologies. Deregulation and the fiscal strains of
local states in the 1980s slowed down public discourse regarding partic-
ipatory media (Prehn 1992, 256; Jankowski and Prehn 2002). However,
studies of community programming still conclude that the globalized

8 Widlok and Jarren claim that the reason for Germany’s late investment in public-access
channels is a result of the monopoly of public networks that did not want to compete
with other providers. Newspaper companies that showed interest in diversifying by
building radio and television presence in joint ventures with public-access initatives
were strongly discouraged by public networks. When the privatization of radio started
after the end of the social-liberal coalition in 1982, public access projects in radio as
well as television segments were crushed by private competitors or had to adopt more
easy-listening formats (see Widlok and Jarren 1992, 133).

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