Like many towns, we have local public access cable channel. (We have a second one for our local campus station, too.) We have a weekly newspaper, and a few websites, but little local news coverage otherwise. The public access channel is our best bet for unedited coverage of municipal meetings and events.
Although there was legitimate concern about a shift of the cable channel to a digital tier, that immediate problem has disappeared. Our public access channel will be accessible on both an analog and digital tier, and thus still be available to the widest group of subscribers as an analog offering. (The channel will move to a different analog station on the cable menu.)
FREE WHITEWATER offers commentary on events in town, by design and intention, and others writing about news in Whitewater do the same by consequence (even if they don’t see it that way). Summaries of news events take the form of commentary whether intentional or not; Bowdlerized news is commentary by a different name.
All commentary is best when the unedited information on a meeting, from which the commentary derives, is available. Residents should always be able to see easily the full measure of a meeting, for content, tone, and atmosphere – all together.
Our public access channel ably fulfills that need.
More to come…