Free Press Fight Finds New Front in Cable TV

There’s no cable television in Cerritos.

Surrounding communities have it, towns in the middle of nowhere have it, but people in this solidly middle-class suburb must wait until federal officials settle a dispute over who lays the cable.

“The residents are frustrated. They would like to see cable television. The surrounding communities have it,” said Cerritos spokeswoman Michele Ogle.

The case is one of many legal battles involving new media technologies. At stake is how the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech and a free press survive in an era of cable TV, satellites, computers and videocassettes.

In the Cerritos case, after a long skirmish, a Federal Communications Commission official recently approved allowing the local phone company to lay cable. But the battle is not over. Cable industry groups opposing phone company involvement in cable systems will likely appeal the ruling, said Michael Morris of the California Cable Television Assn.

New media “is like the old West, where there’s no established law and order, anything goes, and the biggest guy with the most power always wins,” said UCLA communication studies professor Jeff Cole.

For example, police can legally eavesdrop on cellular telephone conversations, even though it would be unlawful to tap the same conversation over regular phone lines without a court order, Cole said. It’s also legal to spy on the phone numbers dialed by a home computer.

“We are going to have to figure out a way to ensure the First Amendment survives the technological revolution,” said FCC public affairs director John Kamp. The FCC regulates broadcast media and some telephone services, but not print media such as newspapers and magazines.

Cerritos wants a futuristic cable system capable of carrying voices, cable television and new interactive services (such as home shopping and banking). GTE Telephone would build the system, lease part to a cable television company and test new services on unused channels.

City officials accepted GTE’s bid in February, 1987, hoping to start service early this year. GTE needs FCC approval to lay the cable. But cable industry groups oppose the plan, citing federal regulations banning telephone companies from operating cable TV in cities where they run the phones.

Such municipal and FCC involvement disturbs some media experts, who contend the First Amendment should keep local and federal governments from deciding who sends or receives information by the new media.

“The phone companies, like any other citizen, enjoy a First Amendment right to be speakers,” said Patrick Maines of the Media Institute in Washington, D.C. He said cable television should have “little or no regulation at the federal or local level.”

Government regulation of new media is “inhibiting the development of new media technologies. The public will have less (media) to choose from than it could have,” said Maines, whose institute houses the First Amendment Center on the New Media.

The First Amendment Center has filed legal briefs and comments with courts and the FCC in eight cases that it feels threaten First Amendment rights of such new media as cable television, telephone information services and electronic publishing.

Questions of who can own new media, how they are used, whether government can monitor who uses them and who is responsible for the information they disseminate are at the heart of the First Amendment issues.

“I don’t want the phone company to be in cable television and control 50 channels,” said former FCC general counsel Henry Geller. He said future fiber-optic transmission lines, which GTE would test in Cerritos, could become a “highway into the home” carrying telephone, television and text messages.

In business terms, how the First Amendment is applied to new media may determine which companies make or lose money in an electronic age. Newspaper publishers have opposed telephone companies’ publishing electronic yellow pages accessible from home computers.

“The phone company should be in directory assistance and eventually it will be electronic,” said Geller, head of the Washington Center for Public Policy Research. The concept “doesn’t bother anybody until they realize electronic Yellow Pages pose a threat to newspaper classified ads.”

Letting telephone companies offer electronic information on their wires could give them an unfair advantage over potential competitors. Some argue that the First Amendment is meant to ensure many media voices and that government rules ensuring free competition among new media help meet that goal, Cole said.

First Amendment battles are nothing new, said USC media law professor Jon Kotler. Legal tussles over rights of new media “happened when movies came along; and then radio and television. . . . As technology develops there are challenges.”

Today’s new media blur the lines between media categories that lawmakers and judges have used for years. The First Amendment was written more than 200 years ago, when print was the only mass medium. The nation’s Communication Act was passed in 1934, when radio and telephone concerns dominated.

“It used to be easy to tell the difference between newspapers and telephones; now it’s not so easy,” said the FCC’s Kamp. Some newspapers send electronic copies of stories to home computers over phone lines.

“I see no difference between the Washington Post I pick up at my doorstep and the Washington Post that comes in on my computer modem, except that I don’t get newsprint ink on my hands,” said Ken Allen of the Information Industry Assn., a group of 650 companies “that see information as their product.”

“They (new media) should have the same protections that the First Amendment provides other information sources,” Allen said. But he cited cases “where information that is put in a new media suddenly loses all of its (First Amendment) protections.”

The California Legislature is considering a state constitutional amendment extending state free speech and press protections to computer communications. The bill has passed the state Assembly and will go to the voters in November if it clears the Senate.

“I think the likelihood of all forms of communication having full First Amendment rights is the most likely course over time,” said Everette Dennis of the Gannett Center for Media Studies in New York. “It may take a long time to happen. But it’s an inevitability.”