Guest Opinion: The beauty of community TV Guest Opinion: The beauty of community TV (March 04, 2005)

Former KMVT director mourns loss

By Wendy Fleet

I wrote the following for KMVT Community Television before it lost its precious focus on the voices of the community. This is what was at stake and why I am so heartbroken for our community:

Community-access television is rooted in the foundations of the very idea of America. If all citizens do not have access to free speech, democracy is neither strong nor true.

Within the guidelines of the Constitution's First Amendment, here at KMVT Community Television, we trust and empower the people themselves. Television is the great story-telling invention of the 20th century. KMVT provides the tools and the training for ordinary people in the community to share their story, their vision of what's important and interesting with their neighbors.
Celebration, connection

Community television is not a mini-HBO, mini-ABC or mini-PBS. We do not organize television material we think you'll buy. We are truly local. We are sublimely American. We believe in your right to speak with no middleman, no commercial or patronizing filter. What you get is authentic, not slick.

We do broadcast people's baby steps. If you begin watching a new community show in April, you see an adventure unfold and by Thanksgiving, this fledgling all-volunteer production will have spread its wings.

In addition to all the diverse, undersung local voices a community producer presents in a year, we are an actual living model of how the community of the future can flourish. A show might well have a Christian volunteer on Camera 1, a Hindu volunteer on Camera 2 and an atheist on Camera 3. This is not rare but typical. The audio person might be 16-years-old and the tape operator 75-years-old.

Community television is an American miracle -- authentic, local, passionate. It's beautiful. In the course of human events, we must treasure and nurture community television for the future so not only the powerful get a voice. So do we the people.

I only wish we had all fought like dogs to save community access here in a flourishing form.
Wendy Fleet is the former Community Access Director at KMVT. Her job was eliminated in a budget-cutting move announced last month.

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