Times Editorial : Silly talk
Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/Editorial/65839/
Recently, Fayetteville City Attorney Kit Williams explained that he doesn’t believe forum discussions have any place on the Government Channel. Believe it or not, it was on a recent Government Channel forum on forums that Williams concluded that the long-standing practice of Government Channel employees producing well-rounded, balanced forums on issues relevant to the local governance was, well, improper.
Aldermen are scheduled to discuss the subject tonight.
Williams says the Government Channel should be a place primarily for coverage of government meetings (obviously its main mission ), but he also allows room for showing “ informational” videos about city services or facilities, or even the occasional video of a debate among candidates for an office. The best place for forums, according to Williams, is on CAT.
Perhaps a little reminder is needed here: CAT, the channel, is operated by Community Access Television, the independent contractor. It’s an organization that’s under contract with the city to operate the public access channel. Under that contract, the organization itself must be “ content-neutral. ” That means it helps provide training and expertise to empower people to produce and air their own television shows, but the organization is forbidden from originating its own content for the channel. Therefore, nobody at CAT will actively engage in developing government-issue forums. That will be left up to individual producers who will make their own decisions about who to invite to participate in a round-table discussion of government issues.
With Government Channel forums in the past, there was always an effort to make sure all foreseeable sides of an issue had some level of representation. If the issue was impact fees, for example, one could expect that proponents and opponents, as well as parties in between, would be invited to engage in a discussion. It was, in as many respects as one could reasonably expect, a genuine effort to have an extended, reasoned level of political discourse on an issue of contemporary relevance to Fayetteville residents.
Does it at all make sense to take a serious effort to engage in a balanced discussion of relevant, current ideas or proposals, and exchange it with forums on the public access channel that will not necessarily have any effort to be fair ?
For example, a “ Forum on the Tree Ordinance” on the Government Channel, as history goes, would have attempted to be a round table that involved critics, defenders and folks from as many perspectives as possible. Under the new approach of relegating such forums to CAT, a “ Forum on the Tree Ordinance” could very well be made up only of people who want the city’s tree ordinance abandoned.
Which outcome best serves the public ? Wellreasoned, productive discussions have come to be an expectation of any forum by the Government Channel.
Certainly, a balanced and informative forum can be produced by someone going through Community Access Television. But those individual producers have no obligation to present balanced views at all.
And we’re not talking about a forum on the benefits of the Kama Sutra. The Government Channel’s forums have typically had — to use lawyer-speak — a rational nexus to issues the local government is debating. On CAT (Channel 18 ), well, show content is a free-for-all, as it should be. Viewers are far more likely to expect to see government-issue discussion on, of all things, the Government Channel (16 ), just as they expect to see education-related discussions on (shock of shocks ) the Educational Channel (14 ).
As it stands, it seems Williams and Mayor Dan Coody’s administration, in following Williams ’ advice, will gut the Government Channel of one of its valuable functions.
If that change occurs, though we think it should not, Williams needs to go further. If the Government Channel needs to retain some “ purity, ” any and all elected officials should be prohibited from “ hosting’ informational shows on the Government Channel. Mayor Dan Coody has been the star of such productions for years, but if the concern is that the Government Channel remain nonpolitical, then these informational shows should be “ hosted” by a nonpartisan figure such as a staff person, or someone who is simply an on-air personality. If the politicians are on them, ship those shows over to CAT, too, we say.