Alternate View is one of the longest public TV cable television access programs in the United States. Produced in Austin, Texas in 1978, it produced 563 hours of programs featuring news, interviews and opinion pieces from a progressive political perspective. Shows the founders and hosts in the air, Douglas Kellner and Frank Morrow, produced a show on almost no budget using facilities at Austin Community Television (ACTV) and The University of Texas at Austin. [1] They also pioneered an innovative syndication system that puts the program on nearly 80 television markets across the country.
Video Alternative Views
Views are equivalent to local PBS stations. Two surveys, one done by a cable company, and another commissioned by it, show that from 20,000 to 30,000 Austin viewers watch Alternative View every week.
Maps Alternative Views
Distribution network
Viewers for Alternative View go beyond the boundaries of Austin, Texas. Many public access television channels allow members to sponsor programs to exhibit in their cable market. In the spring of 1984 Alternative View began sending program tapes to public access TV contacts in Dallas and San Antonio. In Autumn 1984 they added Fayetteville, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Urbana, Illinois. Cities across the United States then joined, and, in the late 1980s, the program was featured in New York, Boston, Portland, San Diego, Marin County, California, Fairfax and Arlington Virginia, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Columbus, Ohio , New Haven, and many other cities. [2]
Content
Each installment of Alternative View includes a regular news section that uses material from non-mainstream news sources to provide stories that are ignored by the founding media, or interpretation of events different from the mainstream.
Alternative View made many important interviews during the breakout, and often was in front of the mainstream media in identifying the main story. His first program featured an Iranian student who discussed opposition to the Shah of Iran and the possibility of his overthrow. It also has a detailed discussion of the Sandinista movement that is fighting to overthrow Anastasio Somoza. There will be a few weeks before the national broadcasting media finds these movements.
The early performances included long-term interviews with Senator Ralph Yarborough, a progressive Texas responsible for legislation such as the National Defense Education Act, and former CIA officials such as John Stockwell and Philip Agee, both of which argued for closing the CIA.
Other interviews include:
- Anti-war and anti-nuclear activists like Helen Caldicott, George Wald, Ramsey Clark, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Klare, David Dellinger, and representatives of the European peace movement. [3]
- New US Left Activists such as David MacReynolds, Stokely Carmichael, Greg Calvert, and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
- Feminists, gay activists, union activists, and representatives of local progressive groups appear on the show; and officials from the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, the former Allende government in Chile, the democratic front in El Salvador, and many other Third World countries and revolutionary movements.
In addition, the Alternative View broadcasts many documentaries, both self-produced and produced by others, and filters out raw video footage of the Lebanese bombings and after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the killing of five communist labor organizers by the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, and counter-revolutionary activities in Nicaragua.
Staff
Alternative Views are managed exclusively by volunteers, many of whom have become influential film makers and television producers. It was founded by Douglas Kellner and Frank Morrow at the University of Texas at Austin. (Kellner is now chairman at UCLA.) There are other producers and hosts, many of whom are taken from Kellner's philosophy courses, including Ali Hossaini, Tommy Pallotta, Noah Khoshbin, Richard Linklater, Steven Best, James Scott, and Danny Postel.
Note
This entry is summarized from an article by Douglas Kellner Public Access: Alternative Views and from Guerilla TV Archive, a repository of documents collected by media expert Deidre Boyle at New York University.
Further reading
- Subject to Changes: Guerilla Television Revisited by Deidre Boyle (Oxford University Press, 1997)
- Television and the Crisis of Democracy by Douglas Kellner (Westview Press, 1990)
- Structure of the Power of the USA and the Mass Media by Frank Morrow (Dissertation of Ph.D., The University of Texas, 1984)
Video link
The Internet archive hosts an ever-growing collection of Alternative Display videos. As of June 2008, over 200 programs are available for viewing or downloading.
The ten-hour Alternate View program is also available as a streaming video on Douglas Kellner's multimedia page
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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