Deep Dish TV

(This story appeared in High Performance #61, Spring 1993.)

Deep Dish TV, the world's first public access satellite network, is doing what broadcast media cannot do for itself: identify and amplify, without alteration or limitation, the voices of the disenfranchised cultures who struggle for equal time.

Conceived in 1986 as the distribution arm of Paper Tiger TV, a New York video production collective, Deep Dish TV is a funky, video-assisted model of democracy bounding across a sea of channel-surfing conglomerates. The current staff of four intrepid, media-wise souls devotes itself to developing minority participation in the promotion of its own self-image—assembling, magazine-style, pictures of the world as we actually know, love and hate it.

Deep Dish TV's cramped quarters in a forlorn, three-story Lower Manhattan building given over to a number of disestablishment organizations, seems to breathe the promise of anarchy from its very walls. As the governing agent leasing transponders to uplink the work of a wide assortment of camcorder-carrying activists and artists, the Dishers have made effective and ultimately subversive use of the sophisticated technology currently available, pushing their network's agenda beyond distribution into coast-to-coast organizing, advocacy and education.

Paying for such programming means attracting funds from sponsors whose philanthropy does not depend on seeing themselves reflected in rich production values. As a board member of one major supporter noted in her grant recommendation, "This is not as much about visual pleasure as political pleasure; this is about the empowerment of the individual with a video camera, not the...passive consumption of high-gloss media."

If not for Deep Dish's efforts to access the work of grassroots video activists and then make it accessible, few citizens would have realized there was an organized resistance alive in the streets of America during the Gulf War. It doesn't take money to make sense, it takes conviction. It helps if you're honest, too.

It was, after all, an amateur videographer who, in the spirit of Abraham Zapruder, galvanized world attention on the beating of Rodney King, and a locally produced Deep Dish special (transmitted by over 300 cable and public television operators) that then thoroughly focused at ground level the abrasive amalgam of incident, argument and image rising out of the King trial verdict. Behind Censorship: The Assault on Civil Liberties, a four-part, seven-hour production composed of caroming views on racism, abortion, homophobia, and what amounts to corporate ownership of the First Amendment, wrapped postmodern iconoclasm in the MTV-like dress of respectability and emerged as, arguably, one of the most compelling documentary mini-series seen on the home screen.

Now, new advances in fiber optic technology recently approved by the FCC for potential Bell-operated use will make it possible for any citizen with a touch-tone phone to access up to 500 television channels, 24 hours a day. Does this mean the ultimate in freedom of choice has arrived, or only its illusion?

The idea is almost civilized, if you like strolling around electronic malls. It could allow, as never before, room for creative, non-commercial programming ideal for serving the public interest.

Well, let's not grin too broadly over the options quite yet. In practice, there looms another reality: imagine a megomaniacal S.P.E.C.T.R.E. out of a James Bond film, corporately selecting the world's access to information, adding to the ever-diminishing number of places for public discourse, a jealously guarded, free speech-dispersing tool whose real-life initials are AT&T.

Who owns the air, anyway? Should anyone? Any single one? What are the ethics of such elemental proprietorship? And who can afford to pay for it? Big Brother, can you spare a bottom line? A loose examination of what's bouncing around the privately-held satellites out there among the furious, ozone-stealing gasses of our global village, reveals the most powerful communications corporations in the country fighting amongst themselves for possession of human receptors everywhere.

Programming director Cynthia Lopez says, "We need to control technology better to control our destinies"—that is, adds Deep Dish Executive Director Kai Lumumba Berrow, our own images. Concerned that the cable industry will fight proposed FCC rules to give preferential leased-channel rates to nonprofits for the establishment of a municipal "Video Dialtone," the Deep Dish guerrillas are rallying, moving door to electronic door to take the boob, at last, out of our tube.

Linda Yablonskaya is a freelance writer living in New York City. She is currently finishing her book, The Diary of a Nicotine Queen. You can visit Deep Dish TV's web site at: http://www.deepdishtv.org

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999