Preserving Public Access TV History

A long-lost piece of community media history now lives in the Community Media Archive: ACM The Campaign for Media Democracy, a set of interviews from the 1998 ACM National Conference in Portland, Oregon about the effort to protect and expand public access television.

The footage was created by Chad Johnston when he was at Antioch, studying with the legendary Bob Devine. Years later, it was preserved on the Internet Archive, where John Hauser uploaded it in 2019 as part of the Community Media Archive. The Archive.org description is brief but powerful: “Documentary on the organization of effort to protect and expand Public Access TV circa 1998.” That small note points to a much larger story: a national field organizing around local speech, cable policy, public rights, and the belief that communities needed media infrastructure of their own.

This is exactly why preservation matters. A conference interview project, once easy to lose in a tape archive or forgotten format, becomes evidence of the field’s living memory. It shows community media not only as local programming, but as a movement of producers, teachers, organizers, and advocates trying to protect democratic communication before the digital era fully arrived.