This could be achieved locally in Our Town, in our times, if the City of St. Augustine and St. Johns County restored their local cable channels to the status quo ante before 2007-2008, when there was local access programming. This was at the behest of MARK RUSSELL, a provincial Palatka manager for Time-Warner, before its takeover by Comcast. RUSSELL told Commissioners he did not like local access because it allowed Bubba Rowe and others to criticize the local governments, and some businessman might sit in his hotel room and decide not to invest here. (Of course, hotel rooms don't have cable television, they have satellite, but this shows the outrageous animus against First Amendment protected activity that underlies greedy Corporate America oligopolists. It's probably why Verizon shut down the NYC cable channel discussed in the NY Times column, below.
GANNETT and GATEHOUSE are about to merge, which means that the First Coast News tv news duopoly (ABC and NBC affiliates), the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union, and the St. Augustine Record will all be under the thumb of the same out-of-state, out-of-touch, oligopolistic corporate masters.
St. Johns County and two itty-bitty cities' cable channels are now almost exclusively government programming, with a few exceptions like League of Women voters debates, boring propaganda outside of those meetings where We, the People occasionally get to ask questions, demand answers and expect democracy.
From The New York Times:
Local News Is Dying. New York May Try to Pass a Law to Save It.
Legislators are proposing a first-in-the-nation bill to force cable companies to offer independent local news.
Vivian Wang
By Vivian Wang
Oct. 21, 2019
Updated 3:25 p.m. ET
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Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without another death blow for local journalism. Another beloved newspaper slashes its staff; another longtime radio program goes silent.
In New York, there might now be a novel solution: government intervention.
Two state lawmakers are proposing a requirement that any cable company operating in New York offer a local news channel with “news, weather and public affairs programming,” according to a draft of the bill. The programming would have to be independently produced; companies could not simply rebroadcast others’ existing news shows.
The bill, if passed, would be the first of its kind in the country. Policymakers elsewhere have considered other forms of intervention to save local news: Earlier this year, New Jersey’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, approved up to $2 million in state funds to support community journalism, making New Jersey the first state to allocate money to the local news landscape, despite concerns about media independence. Massachusetts is considering a study of the industry’s decline; federal lawmakers are debating making it easier for news outlets to become tax exempt.
But New York’s bill would be perhaps the most aggressive attempt by government officials to sustain local news in the long term.
It also would offer a concrete example of shifting attitudes toward corporate responsibility, as public officials, voters and even business leaders acknowledge the need for firms to think not only of profits but also of their impact on society.
“These companies don’t listen when it comes to us encouraging them to keep local programming,” said State Senator Kevin Thomas, a Democrat, one of the bill’s sponsors. “So there comes a time when the Legislature has to tell them. Leaving them to self-regulate, they do things for their own profit-making schemes.”
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the Democrat-led State Senate have already signaled support for the idea, which stemmed from Verizon’s announcement that it would shutter Fios1 News, its hyperlocal news network that covers the Hudson Valley, Long Island and New Jersey, in November.
Verizon officials declined to give a reason for the closure, which will lead to about 150 layoffs. Around the country, plummeting profits have forced the closures of even outlets with fervent commitments to independent reporting.
After Verizon’s announcement, elected officials, including the Democratic leader of the State Senate, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, asked the company to reconsider. Some politicians accused Verizon of prioritizing profits over jobs and public interest.
Disturbed by Verizon's plans to shut down #FiOS1News, a great source of local news & a blow to the already struggling local news landscape.
I encourage all NYers to support local journalism – it’s more important now than ever.
The new bill, which legislators plan to introduce on Monday, would make that much harder.
Under the law, New York’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities including cable, water and natural gas, would decide what qualified as local news. It would also dictate how long and how often each channel was required to show it; smaller companies could have less stringent requirements, said Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti, the bill’s other sponsor.
Mr. Abinanti and Mr. Thomas said they were also considering whether to include online-only content providers, such as Hulu or Amazon Prime, in the rule.
There are legal and technical issues still to be worked out. The federal and state governments share oversight of telecommunications companies, which could limit the state’s ability to act alone. Cable companies could also seek to pass the cost of producing news on to customers.
“Requiring a cable company to run and staff a local news operation is a pretty audacious request,” said Jerry Ellig, a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission who now teaches at George Washington University. “This is pretty much a tax. It may not show up on your cable bill as a line item or anything, but if it’s a cost of doing business, they will certainly pass it on.”
Media experts also warned that such a law could effectively make the government an arbiter of news.
But supporters of the measure say that the bill is a direct response to the excessive deregulation of telecommunications companies and a declaration that companies can and should give back in exchange for the state’s permission to operate in New York.
Mr. Abinanti emphasized that while the Public Service Commission would ensure companies’ compliance with the local news requirement, it would not control the content of that news.
“We can’t tell them, ‘You have to cover what’s going on in Yonkers or Greenburgh,’” he said, naming two localities in Westchester County. “But we can give them a category, local news, and say ‘You go figure out what local news is.’”
A spokeswoman for Verizon said the company has agreed to carry News 12, the local news network run by Altice Optimum, thus maintaining subscribers’ access to a source of local news. She declined to comment on the bill.
Elected officials have often declared their support for a robust news environment, and some have even played a pivotal role in preserving it. In 1993, New York’s governor at the time, Mario M. Cuomo, helped persuade the F.C.C. to allow Rupert Murdoch to buy The New York Post, saving the tabloid from collapse.
Dying Gasp of One Local NewspaperAug. 1, 2019
Federal regulators have also long set regulations for broadcast networks, including an expectation that they promote a diversity of viewpoints, and “foster public understanding” of “important problems and issues facing their local communities,” according to F.C.C. documents.
But the internet has muddled traditional ideas about government’s role in regulating the news, said Martha A. Garcia-Murillo, a professor who specializes in information regulation at Syracuse University. The emergence of blogs and other alternative news sources has made it more difficult to say whether an area truly lacks local news and therefore needs government intervention, she said.
“Where do we draw the line? Can we say with certainty that these other outlets are not competitors?” Professor Garcia-Murillo said. She said the Legislature would have to show that the market is not being served.
Representatives for both Mr. Cuomo and the State Senate said they were committed to the bill’s goals.
“We are definitely in favor of the concept,” Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to the governor, said, though he added that the office needed to review the specific legislation.
Likewise, Mike Murphy, a spokesman for the State Senate, said the decline of local news was “obviously an issue we care deeply about, and it’s something we look to move forward on in the next session.”
A spokesman for the State Assembly, which is also led by Democrats, said the chamber would review the bill.
Despite potential legal concerns, Professor Garcia-Murillo said the bill was a welcome — and overdue — move by government to ensure a strong news economy.
“The government to a certain extent has a responsibility to ensure that the media is fair, is vibrant,” she said. “But if that is the case, that is something that they should have protected over time. They should have been more vigilant about a multitude of voices — not at this point, when you are reacting, but prior.”
Vivian Wang is a reporter for the Metro Desk, covering New York State politics in Albany. She was raised in Chicago and graduated from Yale University. @vwang3
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 22, 2019, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Lawmakers Propose Requiring Cable Companies to Offer Local News
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