Fast Forward: 25 Years Remarks by a CCTV Founder
Delivered by Lauren-Glenn Davitian on the occasion of CCTV's 25th Anniversary Retrospective Screening and Free Speech Art Auction on April 30 2009
Welcome to CCTV's 25th Anniversary Retrospective and Free Speech Art Auction! We are so excited that you are here tonight to join us for this wonderful event! Thank you for coming!
When CCTV started in 1984 we were squarely in the analog age with little understanding of the major changes that were ahead of all of us. Ronald Reagan was president. Richard Snelling was governor (for the first time). Burlington was just barely a three party city.
The media landscape was very different. There were three major national TV networks that broadcast the news once each day. CNN had not yet reached the TV dials of Vermont. In Vermont, there were 50 cable companies serving the state (today there are 12) and dozens of newspapers across-including four in Springfield Vermont alone! In Chittenden County we watched the news on WCAX, WPTZ and WVNY. We read the Burlington Free Press, known for its quality newsroom and the newish, alternative Vanguard Press. Notably, there were four radio stations with their own news departments. It would be another 7 years before the World Wide Web made internet searching common place and transform how information is shared and how local, state and national news is made and delivered.
Public access cable television and CCTV, gave a home to the first "citizen journalists". Thanks to Sam Press (who generously organized our case) and the first CCTV boosters, the we were able to advocate before the Vermont Public Service Board for public access to the cable TV channels-this was before citizens advocated before regulators on a regular basis.
Thanks to Dan Higgins, starting in Winooski, we put regular people doing uneventful (but so very interesting) things on the air for the first time.
Thanks to Nat Ayer we produced long-form interviews with media makers, decisions makers and activists. Knitting the community together, Nat produced Burlington: This Is You, the story of a progressive city in the making, a beacon of citizen based community building that now stands as an example for people across the world. Burlington: This Is You started at 1 hours, grew to 2 ½ and eventually become the 24 hour town meeting television that we know today, that is Channel 17.
With Channel 17, in 1990, we gained the support of the communities around Burlington. With their help, we opened the doors to all political persuasions and produced the first gavel-to-gavel coverage of local public meetings, live call in shows, election forums and election results.
We have always tried to keeping to our beginning principals: give inquiring minds an alternative to mainstream media, let them make up their make up their own minds.
15,000 hours later we find ourselves squarely in the digital age, but really, at the very beginning of what is to come. Channel 17 is now joined by 42 community access channels in Vermont, operated by 23 community media centers like CCTV. We are part of a national network of 2500 access channels across the country.
But more than this, we stand as part of a growing movement of media reform, media justice and that seeks to liberate the means of production and distribution so democracy has "a prayer" and social change can happen.
None of this could have been accomplished without so many of you here tonight and so many who have volunteered and worked to spread the news about their own efforts and the vital importance of free speech. This work is represented in the community resource that we've created together, with the support of cable subscribers throughout Chittenden County, and, with continued diligence, we can protect it as we move into the unchartered waters of the next 25 years.
We will be having a gala party on June 13th at the Boathouse to celebrate the actual anniversary (see your program). But tonight, we wanted to focus on CCTV and Channel 17's programming -- 8000 pieces of media that sit on our shelves (not including more than 5000 meetings that we have not saved). Tonight, we are going to show you about 60 minutes of those 15,000 hours-which means we will all want to see more (and in fact, you can go to our archives at cctv.org and order any of the full program you see tonight!).
I'd like to start with where we started, in Winooski, at the Video Café, with one of CCTV's founders and supporters for lo these many fast moving years, my dear friend life-ling inspiration, Dan Higgins.....