Despite inconvenient timing and little notice, residents of Maui, Hawaii showed up in large numbers at a cable franchise renewal hearing last December. They spoke up to defend their local community TV and radio, Akaku Maui Community Media.
These are some of the voices who spoke.
“Has Maui not been through enough? Have we not lost enough? We have to now consider losing Akaku TV. This is a staple of our community. I never even thought that it was a possibility that I could turn on the TV and not have Akaku. So why? Why is the DCCA [Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs] considering robbing our community of our ability to connect?
Just a few nights ago, the County Council was having a meeting until nine o’clock at night. I have a two year old. I couldn’t watch this meeting in person. I can only watch it on Akaku TV. And what about the people in Molokai or Hana or Lanai? All you people see are dollar signs, and I am so sick of it.
And, if Spectrum thinks that they can make us something similar to Akaku TV, that just shows how little they know about our community. Our communities trust Akaku to tell our stories with dignity and with the full truth, the full story. They give us a place. They give us a platform where no one else does. You’re just going to silence our communities. And I am sick of our government entities and all these acronyms trying to rob our community and steal our voice and silence us. It’s not okay.
Please. I’m begging you to reconsider this very short-sighted decision to divert funding from a local business to a billion dollar corporation. We need Akaku TV. This proposal is an attack on our free speech. It’s an attack on the freedom of the press. You’re cutting off our islands. I go to these meetings, and people say young people need to get involved. You need to get involved. Here we are trying to get involved in this system, and you’re cutting off our resources. You’re pulling the plug on Akaku TV, where I get all of my information. And the DCCA and Spectrum did nothing to let the public know that this was our one and only opportunity to save this public resource. Mahalo, for your time.”
“When I needed training for my employees to learn about video photography as well as digital imaging, Akaku came through for us on that. That, in itself, saved me a lot of money and enhanced my service to the community. The other thing is that I ran for office. Unfortunately, I didn’t get in. But Akaku is always there for us, not only for the candidates, but also for the voters. They are very fair. They know what they’re talking about. And, during the election, if you needed information about what’s going on here in Maui, you can rely on Akaku to get it done for you. I found out [about] this meeting Saturday or Friday afternoon, and I’m very active in the community. So I’m looking at here, maybe if we knew more about it, maybe more people from Lahaina would have showed up. But hopefully this will never happen again because we, the people of the County of Maui, which is the island of Maui, Molokai and Lanai, we need Akaku, and we don’t want anybody else from a big corporation telling us what we need to do here, especially when the same corporation says that we’re here for you; but, when you call them up, they’ve got a company answering for them. They couldn’t even pronounce Lahaina.”
AKAKU Maui Community Media is an independent, non-profit public access television and community radio station affiliated with Pacifica Network. It serves more than 53,000 homes on Maui, Molokai and Lanai. But recently, as Spectrum, its host cable service, is up for franchise renewal AKAKU is being slated for defunding. Jay April, President and CEO of AKAKU, explains the situation to Pacifica Network’s Ursula Ruedenberg.
Ursula: Maui Community Media is an independent nonprofit public education and government access television station. It is also a community radio station affiliated with Pacifica Network. As well as the radio, it runs three cable television channels that serve more than 53,000 Spectrum Cable homes on Maui, Molokai and Lanai. It also does community media training and production.
Jay April: Akaku is a public access television station. I like to think of it as a beacon of free speech, really the best way that people can communicate to each other in the middle of the ocean. Most people don’t realize that Maui is the only county in the United States with three islands. We’re separated by water, and these islands are very diverse.
Akaku is basically a Hawaiian word that means reflection. It also means extraordinary vision. And we’re a vibrant network with a tremendous amount of community input. We cover County Council meetings, and we have a production department that does production for people.
Ursula: And the reason we know each other is because you also have a community radio station as part of your company.
Jay: Right. It’s a great marriage in between the radio and the TV. And we also simulcast a lot of the radio shows on the public access channel, and we do a daily news show that we simulcast on the radio. It’s the only local news for Maui other than some stuff on the web.
Ursula: We’re big fans of Akaku, impressive accomplishments.
Jay: Thanks, Ursula, and you guys are fantastic. People really, really love Pacifica. I mean, you’re really the backbone of our station.
Ursula: Well, thank you so much. Maui recently, so infamously, went through this tragedy with the fire. Was it a value at that time to have a local media like Akaku? Did you play a role in that?
Jay: Oh, absolutely, a central role. It’s indescribable how horrible that was. Lahaina, former capital of the kingdom, a beautiful community of mostly immigrants from around the Pacific, one of the most iconic places in Hawaii, [was] completely destroyed, and the island is still hurting. So we were there 24/7, and we still are, covering the recovery which could take at least 10 years or more.
The national media was around for a few weeks. The governor comes and the mayor comes, and people from all over the country come and they promise this, that, the other thing, and we keep track of it, you know. We hold people to task. We’re not controlled by the state and we’re not controlled by the cable company. We’re Maui’s TV channel. We have a small little Citizen Board of Directors, and we allow anyone to come on our air and say whatever they need to say without censorship. And community media is really, in my view, a real beacon of free speech, particularly now when everything is so fragmented.
But unfortunately, community media, community radio, is always under attack; and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the State of Hawaii decided that they were going to take money from the franchise fee that we get and divert it back to the cable company, diminishing the voice of our community. And that’s a very high cost to pay. Unfortunately, community radio and community television are the only democratic media left in the country; and, now that people are being pushed more and more into social media, those are all commercial outlets. If you don’t get enough likes, if you don’t get enough clicks, you’re not successful. If they don’t like you, they kick you off. So people really can’t say what they want to say. So almost every form of media in America are corporate, except for community television and community radio, right? But these are democratic media sources that are under attack, and they’re taking away the voice when they do this. And they don’t care. They just want to maximize profit. John Nichols, from The Nation, said, if we don’t have community media, our democracy goes into the toilet, so that sets the framework for what we’re all dealing with today.
Ursula: Well, I would like a little bit of a Cable Franchise for Dummies explanation, so that the folks listening to this can understand what’s happening.
Jay: Public Access started back in the 70s. You know, television was the dominant medium, and we had antennas on our roof that would get broadcast channels into our houses. Everybody was glued to the TV at six o’clock every day. There’s no such thing as video-on-demand or any of these things we have today. So television was an extremely powerful medium.
Then this thing called cable came along. What happened in the 70s, when the satellites went up in the sky, companies like HBO came along, and they said, ‘Well, if we could send those signals, say, from New York, up to the satellite, then the satellite would bounce these signals back down to the cable company that would have a satellite dish, put a cable up on the telephone poles, and then that satellite dish would distribute the channels on the telephone poles and run that cable into your house, so you could get hundreds and hundreds of channels.’
So most people don’t realize that six feet from your property line to the street you have what’s called the public rights of way; and all those poles, well, they’re actually paid for by taxpayers, back in the 30s, I believe. Something called the Rural Electrification Administration decided that Americans needed electricity and Americans needed communications, telephone basically. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to put these poles up everywhere and run electricity into everybody’s house.
You know, when you drive down the street you see all these poles. That’s all public property. So cable business said, ‘Okay, we want to put our wires up on telephone poles, and we want to run these wires into your house so you can watch hundreds and hundreds of channels, right?’ So, you know, these cable companies mid-70s or so started to sprout up everywhere, and it was a lot like the railroads in the 1850s. With these cable companies, if they could get the license to operate in your public right of way in front of your house and get that cable into your house, they knew that they were going to be collecting money forever, right, and so became a big business. And they had all these channels where they didn’t have enough content.
Ursula: Were the cable companies required to give money?
Jay: Yes, yes. So the FCC was more progressive back then. The FCC made a rule: if you’re going to use our public rights of way to base your entertainment monopoly, you’re going to have to pay some rent. You can’t use our public rights of way for free. This is the Communications Act of 1984. The rule basically said, in exchange for using the public right of way, the cable companies will be required to pay 5% gross revenue franchise fee.
Ursula: Franchise. In a way, that’s the equivalent of what we know in radio as a radio license, right?
Jay: They were given franchises or basically licenses. So they get a license to operate by a local franchising authority, which, in most cases, was a municipality. In some cases, it was a county. In a few cases, it was a state. And the FCC said, ‘What if we took the most powerful communications media in the world, which was television, and we had people have access to their government, have access to education, have access to each other. Let’s create nonprofit TV stations all over the country and provide a percentage of gross revenue of the cable company to run these nonprofits.’
So, in the early 70s, that’s kind of what happened. 1975, I remember reading this FCC rule, ‘Cable companies must provide public access channels, and everyone can be on television for five minutes for free.’ And I was so excited.
Basically what the government did, they said, ‘Okay, if you’re going to use our public rights of way, you’re going to have to provide public education and government access channels.’ So these channels started to sprout up to provide free public education and government access channels. And what ended up happening over the mid 70s, maybe early 80s, more and more nonprofits started to sprout up around the country where these public access channels started to materialize. The jurisdictions were by town or by county. New York City was one of the first, Aspen, Colorado; Austin, Texas.
Ursula: So the cable companies had to provide channels to community access, and then they had to pay a certain amount of money to make it possible for those community access televisions to operate.
Jay: Yes. So we get 3% of the gross revenue to service Maui. Oahu has a public access station. Hawaii has one, and the Big Island has one. And so we’re all separate entities that receive 3% of the gross revenue from the cable company.
Now, back then, you’ve still like hundreds and hundreds of cable companies, right? But cable became so lucrative that there was more and more concentration of cable companies. So you go from hundreds to like 10, then from 10 to five. Now there’s three or four cable companies that dominate all the cable systems in America, Spectrum, Charter and Comcast. And they control almost all the cable systems in the country.
Ursula: You get your channels from Spectrum.
Jay: From Spectrum, yeah. We have three channels, a public channel, a government channel and an educational channel; and we get 3% of gross revenue, which in our case is a little over a million dollars a year. Then we also get a capital contribution on top of that, about $3 a subscriber, so a little over a million dollars, like $1.2 or $1.3 million a year from the franchise fees. And this has been going on now for about 30 years. Since 1992, we’ve been receiving this money.
Now, this is really interesting. In 1984, when the Communication Act was being negotiated, at the end of the day, the 1984 Cable Act said municipalities or counties that collect this 5% franchise fees weren’t required to put it into public education and government access, recommended but not required.
Ursula: So that means that community access television was at the behest of the local government?
Jay: Right. In most cases, it was at the behest. That’s when community television started off, sort of as a stepchild of government, which was unfortunate.
And now we have the state coming along to give a franchise renewal to Spectrum to renew their license. And they’ve said, ‘Okay, we’re going to take maybe up to 1/3 of the little bit of money that you get, and we’re going to divert it back to Spectrum, so Spectrum can finance a private, secret state-run inet.’
Backtrack a little bit. When cable companies came into America, they wired all these cities and towns; and, to sweeten the pot to get the license, they oftentimes put together a separate institutional network to link up schools and to link police and fire departments together, government buildings. Most of those inets aren’t operating; and, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the State of Hawaii decided that they were going to take money that we get from the franchise fee and divert it back to the cable company to work on these inets.
They did that in Kauai. And, when I heard about that, I was trying to figure out why, and then I looked into it. And, in 2016, the Trump FCC made a rule. It’s called FCC Rule 621, allowing cable companies to retroactively charge for these inets. So, remember when we began this discussion and we said, ‘Well, the municipalities or the local franchising authority, in this case it’s the State of Hawaii, can take 5% of revenue.’ Well, this Trump rule in 2016 said the cable companies can unilaterally deduct from this 5% fair market value of the cost of operating these shadow inets.
So they’re talking about how much they love Lahaina and how much they love us because we cover Lahaina and we’re helping the Maui people. But, behind closed doors, Spectrum, the State regulatory authorities and some bad actors in Oahu reduce public benefit to make us least affected. This is basically a takeover of community media.
Spectrum runs the table in almost every jurisdiction in America. They tell their regulators what to do, and the regulators do it. Spectrum in Hawaii were on our governor’s transition team. Spectrum also was involved in the hiring of the regulators that regulate. So you have this situation where you have government and industry working hand in hand to deprive the public of the benefit of public access television. They didn’t bother to do any kind of financial or technical audit of this inet.
But what happened here is the State had a public hearing on Maui on December 9 for us to comment, have a meeting on a Monday morning, providing hardly any notice to anyone. They have to have a public hearing, but they’re not really interested in listening. They’re about to rubber stamp what they wanted to do.
Ursula: In a sense, what they’re saying [is] the inet is a public service because it supports libraries and schools. So they’re moving that obligation to serve the public away from facilities like yours, which are nonprofit organizations, and they’re moving it into this thing called inet, which is kind of a public service being run by a private company. Isn’t that kind of what they’re saying?
Jay: Yeah, that’s their lie, is that, you know, at the expense of public access, it’s important and necessary. Our hands are tied. It’s the FCC, the Federal mandate. The Feds are telling us that we have to do this.
Ursula: It’s not really a mandate, right?
Jay: It’s not a mandate at all. It’s voluntary on the part of Spectrum. And so the state of Hawaii is basically taking the Spectrum line, taking the bait, hook, line and sinker, and following Spectrum’s lead.
What are we paying for? What are we getting? Well, I can tell you right now that, on Maui, maybe police and fire might be using this inet, but most of the inet is dark. It’s not activated. It doesn’t have electronics attached to it, so I doubt very much that it would justify anything close to some of the monies that they’re deciding to siphon away from us.
Ursula: They don’t have any plans to create the kind of news or forum for people to express their views or the community forum that you provide. They’re not planning to do anything like that.
Jay: Not at all. They basically want to take this money away from the public.
Ursula: One more question before we move on. Why do you think that the Trump administration made the ruling in the first place?
Jay: Well, if you know anything about cable, cable is one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States. The amount of money that’s collected by cable companies, because they’re basically internet monopolies and they’re cable monopolies. So a company like Comcast or Spectrum/Charter, for instance, they spread the money around to every politician in America. They just have a tremendous amount of political influence.
Ursula: But you’re saying it was really basically a money grab.
Jay: Yeah, a huge money grab. They don’t want to pay the rent. Everybody has to pay the rent. They don’t want to pay the rent. That’s basically what it boils down to.
And they have all kinds of mechanisms to siphon that money back. And that’s basically what they’re doing. Let’s get some of that money back. You know, these unwashed public access stations that aren’t professional, that just have peasantry allowed to say whatever they want, we don’t need them. We can just run over them. They have very little money, very little power. So this is basically a takeover, essentially taking away our ability to operate.
I mean, it’ll have the effect of shutting down the survival information pipeline for the Lahaina recovery and the fire survivors, and the people of Maui are going to have to pay dearly for this. I might have to cut back on my daily news program. I might have to fire my programmer that just had a baby. I mean, this is a naked attempt to just basically decimate community television in Hawaii to the benefit of Spectrum.
I mean, this isn’t new. You know, we’re always operating on a shoestring. We have a small, little citizen Board of Directors. And we’re not controlled by the State. We’re not controlled by the cable company. We allow anyone to come on our air and say whatever they need to say, without censorship, without algorithm. They can’t stand that. They don’t care that they’re in the public rights of way. They don’t want regulation. They have the money to do what they want to do already.
This is just, like you said, it’s a grab. It’s a land grab. It’s an electronic real estate grab. Let’s get the electronic real estate. Let’s get the money and let’s cut the public off at the knees.
Ursula: So, on December 9, the State held a public hearing about this. It was, as you said, not very well advertised, and it was kind of at an awkward time. But you got a pretty large community response. Can you talk a little bit about what happened?
Jay: Yeah, I was actually quite humbled by the response. We heard about this thing at the last minute. The State only posted the notice on their website. They didn’t really let people know.
Ursula: Did you get a notice?
Jay: I didn’t. I was checking the website. That’s the only way I found out, which was, I thought, very disingenuous of the State not to send me a notice seeing that we’re a vested interest. They didn’t.
So we put the word out on our channels and also on our monthly newsletter that it was happening. The bottom line is, I’d say about 100 people showed up, which was astounding. When Kauai had their public hearing, one person showed up. So 100 people show up, and then many more on Zoom. The meeting went on for like four hours. It was unanimous. It was like a tsunami of opinion against this move. I think 65 people testified. They sent the deputy. He sat there and listened for four and a half hours; and, you know, he had to go back to Oahu with his tail between his legs, basically. It was like they didn’t have pitchforks and torches. But it was unanimous. Nobody wants this. All we really want is stable funding, 3% for the next 15 years. We’re not even talking about adjusting for inflation.
And we want what everybody else has, which is high definition television. Every channel on the cable is high definition, except for public access channels; and that’s a discriminatory practice that they put into place. So we want be on a par with every other channel. And we also want our stable funding for the next 15 years. That’s all we’re asking for. It’s not a big ask. We had one of our State senators show up and basically say that. He said, ‘This is not a big ask.’ There’s plenty of money out there for broadband and inets and that kind of thing to take the money away from community television and community radio and put it into these shadow State-run inets. It’s just wrong. It’s just wrong on every level; and the way they’re doing it, the way they’re trying to accomplish it, violates many state laws and rules. That’s why we’re going to go to court because government doesn’t follow its own rules unless they’re forced to. I’m looking for a do over.
And this is not unique. This is happening all over the country, and I’m imagining that this is going to happen in more and more jurisdictions. This is kind of a test case, in a way.
Ursula: So Akaku is going to go to court over this.
Jay: Yeah.
Ursula: Well, thank you. Any last words? I appreciate you.
Jay: I love Pacifica radio, Ursula. I mean, it is such a light. People love it here too. Thanks for broadcasting too. Hopefully we can work together and beat back these forces of late stage capitalism.
Ursula: Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
Jay: Thank you for what you’re doing.
Renewal hearing photo used with permission of AKAKU radio.