Hate on the Air: A Question of Access

“Race and Reason” opens with soft, insistent piano music and a shot of the host in a three-piece suit, seated at a table. He has a monotonic, almost hypnotic voice. But the words, at times raw and vicious, explode.

“Hi, I’m Tom Metzger,” he said, introducing a recent show. “ ‘Race and Reason’ is seen in 55 cities around the United States, one of the longest-running shows on cable access. We stand for freedom of speech, total freedom of speech, an island of free speech in a sea of controlled and very managed news. Today’s guest is Carl Straight, a roving reporter of ours who’s done some excellent reviews on the kosher food racket. . . .’ ”

Metzger, a TV repairman in Fallbrook, Calif., is leader of the White American Political Assn. and the White Aryan Resistance, a former San Diego congressional candidate and a former California grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

For the past four years, he has hosted “Race and Reason,” a talk show that is shown on public access channels on cable television--channels that by design are open to anyone who submits a tape.

Often, they are conduits for programming from government agencies, health care organizations and local religious, ethnic and civic groups.

From Sacramento to Cincinnati, from Austin, Tex., to Spokane, Wash., “Race and Reason” has provoked controversy. Going beyond the confrontational type of “shock TV” practiced on commercial television by the likes of Morton Downey Jr. and Wally George, this is “hate TV.”

Racial slurs are commonplace, the suggestion that Asians and other minorities should be stopped at the U.S. border is routine, and the allegation that Jews run the country is frequent.

Wearing a T-shirt with the message “White Revolution Is the Only Solution,” guest speaker Straight talked about white supremacists jailed for illegally bearing arms who are in cells with “some of the greasiest-looking . . . you ever seen in your life. You can tell these guys come from the black ghettoes of Watts or somewhere.”

The City Council in Kansas City recently shut down its public access channel rather than let the Ku Klux Klan show “Race and Reason.” Now the show could become a test case of the future of public access programming and the constitutional limits of free speech on cable TV.

“Race and Reason,” a program of “talking heads,” rarely shouts.

Metzger generally acts as the protagonist who enables his guests to unload their material. Sample remarks made on “Race and Reason”:

--Herbert Poinsett of Atlanta opined that “blacks are 15 to 20 IQ points below us” and that “Polish people are excellent; they had ‘em in the Waffen SS.”

--Klansman J.B. Stoner, who was convicted of the 1958 bombing of a black Baptist church in Birmingham, claimed that the AIDS virus is spread by blacks and Jews.

--Karl Hand, commander of the National Socialist Liberation Front based in New Orleans, called Hitler “a great man,” while Metzger’s response was a concern that “Mein Kampf” is misquoted.

Although Metzger said on the program with Straight that the show was appearing in 55 cities, he said in a more recent interview that it was in 40 cities. When asked to name them, he and his wife came up with about 20--including San Francisco, San Diego and cities in the west San Fernando Valley and Orange County. Outside California, the series is seen in Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Richmond, Va., and Memphis, and has been shown in such cities as New York, Norwood, Ohio, and Pocatello, Ida.

“We feel this is quite an accomplishment over a period of four years. We’ve gone from nothing to virtually being all over,” Metzger said. “I’m much more influential around the country due to this notoriety, yes.”

Metzger figures he has done about 80 shows. In the past year, most have been taped at Comcast Cable in a residential Fullerton neighborhood after student protests forced him out of facilities at Cal State Fullerton.

The Comcast division, which serves Fullerton, Placentia and Buena Park, shows Metzger about twice a month. To be eligible, said Lisa Yale, until recently Comcast’s director of community programming, “you have to reside or be affiliated with a group or organization in the community, and his producer, David Wiley (composer of the theme music), is a resident of Fullerton.”

There is an occasional protest call, although Comcast, like most cable companies, displays a disclaimer saying the company is not responsible for the opinions expressed.

“It’s his First Amendment right,” Yale said. “We just make sure the program’s not obscene or indecent, no profanities or obscenities.”

An estimated 1,500 to 1,700 of the 8,000 cable systems across the country have some kind of public access channels, according to Sharon Ingraham, board chairwoman of the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers. These channels are part of the usually exclusive franchise agreements that city and county governments arrange with cable companies.

Once public access is in place, the Cable Act of 1984 bars companies from exercising “any editorial control over any public, educational or governmental use of channel capacity” other than that which is “obscene . . . or otherwise unprotected by the Constitution.”

“Electronic media have become so important, and this is the only uncensored domain,” Ingraham said. “You can’t go to a broadcast station to express your opinion, or to PBS.”

The House Energy and Commerce Committee report on the Cable Act noted: “The development of cable television, with its abundance of channels, can provide the public and program providers the meaningful access that, up until now, has been difficult to obtain. (This) will mean a wide diversity of information sources for the public--the fundamental goal of the First Amendment. . . . Public access channels are often the video equivalent of the speaker’s soapbox or the electronic parallel to the printed leaflet.”

Cable companies, which often set up nonprofit independent subsidiaries to run the access channels, require tapes that meet technical standards, and often provide training and facilities for area residents to do their own shows.

Some cable companies insist that the access programs they transmit be locally produced, others simply require a local resident to sponsor tapes, and still others, as in Phoenix and the west San Fernando Valley, have no geographic restrictions. Programs are generally treated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Is there a right to public access?

On June 16, the Kansas City Council voted 9-2 to get rid of its local cable company’s public access channel, thereby preventing the Ku Klux Klan from using it. Instead, the council gave American Cablevision power to substitute a community channel controlled by the company.

“There is no First Amendment guarantee that protects access to cable television,” Mayor Richard L. Berkley said after the vote.

“We are a courageous community, a city placed on a mountain of visibility because we dare to say no, “ said the Rev. Emanuel Cleaver, a councilman.

The Kansas City vote capped a nearly yearlong dispute that began when J. Allen Moran, leader of the Missouri Knights of the KKK, and Dennis Mahon, a Klan organizer, tried to get some “Race and Reason” tapes onto American Cablevision’s public access channel.

Carol Rothwell, director of public affairs for the cable company, which serves 140,000 households, said the shows were rejected because the company permitted only programming that had been produced locally.

“Our franchise didn’t spell that out, but there were so many tapes floating out there, we decided we would limit it to just local. Several months later, they (the Klansmen) announced they wanted to do a local show, but by that time the council was looking into whether they would continue access.”

Moran said he was never able to make his own tapes: “We were banned from the facility.”

Rothwell said company officials looked at one of the Metzger tapes.

“The one we saw was dealing with the Holocaust, saying the number of deaths was grossly exaggerated and that those who have money write history. It’s counter to everything we believe in.”

Within days of the City Council’s vote to shut down the public access channel, the American Civil Liberties Union said it would file a suit on the grounds that the council action violated the First Amendment right of free speech.

On July 18, Stephen Pevar, staff counsel for the ACLU’s Mountain States regional office, sent a letter to American Cablevision asking the company to respond within 30 days to the Klan’s application for production.

The matter is now in the hands of the American Cablevision’s lawyers. But Rothwell told The Times: “Based on the response of our cable customers and the City Council in removing the access, we have no intention of letting the Klan do a regular show.”

“Our position is really relatively simple,” City Atty. Richard Ward said. “We think that as long as you have a First Amendment forum such as a public access channel, you have to allow anyone (on). We don’t think there is any legal requirement for us to maintain that public forum. Our motives, whatever they may have been, are irrelevant.”

Many legal experts disagree.

“What was wrong with what Kansas City did legally was that they did it for a content-based reason,” said Michael Meyerson, assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore Law School, who has written extensively on cable issues.

“They disliked the content of one of the speakers and, very simply, no government can act in hostility to a speaker’s view. Even though cable television is so new and public access is even newer, the principles are as old as the Constitution.”

Tracy Weston, who teaches communications law at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, noted that “a city can obviously decide they’ll never have an access channel in the first place, but it’s not clear they can cut it off the air because they don’t like a certain viewpoint. A city doesn’t have to create a public park in a certain location but, once they do, they can’t censor the speakers in it.”

On the other hand, cable operators and legal experts such as Lucas A. Powe Jr., professor at the University of Texas Law School and author of “American Broadcasting and the First Amendment,” argue that cable operators have the same First Amendment rights as newspaper publishers.

Yet the House report on the Cable Act of 1984 said that “with regard to the access requirement, cable operators act as conduits. They do not exercise their editorial discretion over the programming; nor are they prevented or chilled in any way from presenting their views and programming on the vast majority of channels otherwise available to them.”

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor and First Amendment lawyer, suggested that “in one sense a person who owns a cable station is like the publisher of a newspaper, which means that he has certain rights not to allow this kind of stuff on the air. But in another sense, cable is like the soapbox in the park.”

Kansas City, he said, “clearly did it (eliminated access) for content reasons.” But the “case is a slightly harder one,” Dershowitz added, when government is not involved “and the cable operator says, ‘Look, this just offends me, I’m just not going to allow racists on my station because my name, my good name, is identified with my station. . . .’

“If this (cable) is really owned by individuals, then it seems to me government ought to set up one more station in every city which is not owned by individuals, which is really like a park.”

Metzger said he has mixed reactions.

“Probably in the long run,” he said, “free speech is much better for us, but if the system shows itself too openly to deny us free speech, then it gives us the excuse to up the price of poker. And I can go to our people and say, ‘Look, we tried the system, we went by their rules. . .’ and ‘we’re not going to take it anymore,’ like the movie says. Across the country, white youths are (already) fighting back with their fists, with clubs.”

On June 19, three days after Kansas City voted, the Northwest Knights of the Klan went on Cox Cable in Spokane. Now Alan Collins, general manager, would like the Spokane City Council to follow Kansas City’s lead. Or he hopes the rules change when the franchise agreement expires at the end of 1989. Council members have begun debating the issue.

On June 28, Storer Cable Communications in central Florida rejected a proposal by Tony Bastanzio, grand wizard of a Klan chapter, to broadcast a biweekly series.

Tony Pupo, manager of the Storer unit in Altamonte Springs, said company lawyers had determined that while the franchise agreement requires government access to cable stations, there is no obligation to provide public access channels.

Bastanzio told The Times he has already filed a civil lawsuit in Seminole County asking $2,500 from Storer for production costs, and promised that “once I get my production costs, I’m going to turn around and sue for discrimination in federal court.”

Other cities have weathered the storms of “hate TV.”

Austin Community TV in the Texas capital has been airing “Race and Reason,” sponsored by a local resident, Thursday nights at 9:30 virtually since the Cable Act was passed. According to a report by the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, the city was initially “tense. . . . But ACTV had devoted considerable effort to educating city officials on the First Amendment and the value of public access.”

Alan Bushong, ACTV’s executive director, said in an interview that he began “to encourage everyone in the community to make their own programs. As a result, four new weekly program series from the black and Jewish communities began. You can drown out these hate messages.”

A month after public access began on Sacramento Community Cable Foundation in 1986, “Race and Reason” was brought in. As in Austin, executive director Randy Van Dalsen had been preparing the city for a year before public access.

“As soon as we found out about (Metzger), we returned to many of the organizations we had contacted in our outreach effort,” Van Dalsen said, “and told them the same facilities were available to them--the NAACP, the Urban League, the Mexican American Political Assn., the Jewish Federation here in town. And a couple decided the program was not worth a response.

“An organization of Jewish residents saw the program on kosherization and just laughed. ‘We can’t take it too seriously,’ they said. What they did was contact the San Francisco chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. They didn’t want to simply react; they wanted to state their own agenda.

“We showed documentaries on the Holocaust, including ‘Anne Frank in Maine,’ about junior high school students in Kennebunk, Me., learning about the Holocaust, because the arguments coming from some of these Metzger programs was that the Holocaust never happened. ‘Anne Frank’ was very powerful.”

“Race and Reason” stopped showing in Sacramento in March, 1987, after local sponsor Greg Withrow severed ties with the Klan and neo-Nazis.

In Cincinnati last fall, Mayor Charles Luken sought to suspend public access after “Race and Reason” was broadcast in nearby Norwood. But community groups rallied to save public access through counter-programming, and the hate messages fizzled.

“Public access is too important a right that people have in America,” said Chuck Sherwood, executive director of Cincinnati Community Access Corp.

“So why stop the work of human and social service agencies, the local church groups, local artists, neighborhood groups, all the different users? Why cut off your nose to spite your face?”