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This delightful "anything goes" informality can go too far. Annie Patterson, 59, makes vigorous use of Orange Cablevision to air her "inside" knowledge of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Since The Annie Patterson Show often displays "real bad form," Program Coordinator Debi Amos personally supervises the telecasting but says, "I can't stop her because I have no law or rules to stop her with." That dilemma is not unique. In Reading last year there were two programs by the Ku Klux Klan.
The FCC forbids cable companies to interfere with public-access programming, except in a few cases, including obscenity. But even here it has left unresolved the question of who is responsible for deciding what is obscene—the company, the individual user, or some third party like a committee. In New York, where a state law prohibiting any censorship of public access further muddies the obscenity issue, a program called The Underground Tonight Show recently showed a startlingly explicit tape of a "female-masturbation therapy class." One of New York City's cable companies carried it, preceding it with a disclaimer explaining the legal muddle. The other simply cut five minutes from the eight-minute tape. Both companies may have acted illegally. Another weekly New York show, produced by Anton Perich, 29, features a campy troupe of players doing takeoffs of various sexual proclivities (and occasionally of their clothing in the process). Because of a few shows like these, the New York public channels are sometimes called "pubic access."
Cable companies unanimously do not want to assume censorship responsibility. Says a spokeswoman for New York's Manhattan Cable TV: "It is not our channel; it is the public's channel." But many operators would like some sort of community-review system to try to implement the FCC'S obscenity clause.
In most cities, however, public access is barely getting off the ground, much less flying in the face of convention. "It's really hard work getting people to do things," says Sharon Portin, station manager in Lynnwood. Her company's biggest problem, she adds, is that "one minute we're the good guys for making our studio facilities available, and the next minute we're the bad guys for refusing to take our remote equipment down the Columbia River on a raft filled with a 16-piece band."