AT&T stymies access to public television and government meetings

It’s the media battle no one is watching. No one except Bites and maybe a few fans of public-access television and televised local-government meetings. Maybe them. Ah, well, you knew what you were getting into when you decided to read this column.

After several years, the Sacramento Metropolitan Cable Television Commission has given up the good fight against AT&T and its shoddy treatment of local public, education and governmental access channels.

The so-called PEG channels include Metro Cable Channel 14, which shows city council and school-board meetings, and public-television station KVIE’s second channel, KVIE 7, and all of Access Sacramento’s programming on Channels 17 and 18, everything from high-school sports to political shows like Jeanie Keltner’s Soapbox!

AT&T’s U-verse service shunts all of those channels—along with the PEG channels coming from neighboring counties—into Channel 99, which isn’t really a channel at all, but an “app” that makes it impossible to find the PEG channels in the regular program guide, and prevents users from recording any programming with their digital video recorder (see “Public-access ghetto” SN&R Bites; September 5, 2013).

It used to be worse. At first, AT&T wouldn’t include closed-captioning service on those channels, and the picture quality was horrendous. And recently, the PEG channels were down for several days for local U-verse customers. No one seemed to notice.

Advocates for public media call Channel 99 the “PEG ghetto,” and the Sacramento Metropolitan Cable Television Commission, along with the cities of Los Angeles and El Segundo, sued AT&T to get the telecom giant to comply with state law requiring equal access to these channels.

Well, a settlement has now been reached. And in exchange for dropping the lawsuit, Sacramento and the other cities will get, well, not much.

In Sacramento, the Channel 99 PEG ghetto will be supplemented by another “app,” Channel 14, which will contain just the Sacramento County PEG channels. This is not in any way better than the current situation—and it will still block recording of government meetings and other PEG programming for U-verse customers.

AT&T has also agreed to set up a monitoring station so the cable commission can actually find out when the PEG channels go down. Weirdly enough, U-verse service currently doesn’t reach the cable commission offices.

Cable commission lawyer Harriet Steiner said the settlement followed from the realization that AT&T was going to keep dragging the case out, and that years of appeals and mounting legal costs were likely. “It became clear it would be quite some time before we saw any benefit. If we saw any benefit at all.”

The Sacramento City Unified School District is still looking for a new superintendent after the old one, Jonathan P. Raymond, pulled a midyear disappearing act. Raymond was an autocrat; with the support of a good-old-boy school board, he shut parents, employees and taxpayers out of key decisions.

Now the school district wants to know, what qualities do you want to see in a new superintendent? The school district is so serious about public input that it held one public meeting this week. Also, a SurveyMonkey survey has been posted online, which you might stumble upon if you happened to be checking the district’s website. Truly, a new day of transparency and public engagement at SCUSD.

Bites will fill it out later, and perhaps suggest a superintendent who doesn’t blow off interview requests, as current interim Superintendent Sara Noguchi has done. And maybe someone who will follow the California Public Records Act, which the current administration does not. Your suggestions may vary.

Raymond’s right-hand man, school board president Patrick Kennedy, is moving on, too, rolling an all-but-unopposed election as county supervisor this June. Not too many $100,000-a-year jobs out there, free for the asking. But Kennedy’s got a knack for that kind of thing.

So far, the theme of the Kennedy campaign seems to be “Patrick Kennedy!” His Facebook page and Twitter feed carefully avoid any substantive issues. Not a peep about sprawl or income inequality or affordable housing. Kennedy was at one time a vocal skeptic about the city’s arena scheme; he’s been quiet about that, too, now that Region Builders is backing his noncampaign.

After the umpteenth post about the latest endorsement from some chamber of commerce group or establishment politician, or invitation to yet another campaign fundraiser, Bites posted a comment on Kennedy’s Facebook, asking what any democracy enthusiast ought to be asking: “Is this campaign about anything?” and questioning how Kennedy’s policies will be different than his predecessor, developer darling Jimmie Yee.

The comment was immediately deleted, and Bites was blocked from making further comments. So, there you go. Kennedy’s campaign is completely vacuous—but at least he’s totally thin-skinned about it.