Poor Tape Quality Cited in Canceling ‘Race and Reason’ : Torrance: The TV series by white supremacist Tom Metzger was due to air this week, but city officials said the flawed tape would hiss when it was transmitted.

Torrance officials abruptly canceled the scheduled Wednesday airing of a white supremacist program on a city public access cable television channel, saying the taped show was technically flawed.

City officials said Tuesday’s cancellation of an episode of the series “Race and Reason” was unrelated to its contents.

“It hisses,” City Atty. Kenneth L. Nelson said.

Cable Administrator Michael D. Smith said Wednesday that the tape was of poor quality, that the colors were blurred and that the tape would hiss when transmitted.

Officials said the Torrance resident who submitted the tape can submit a replacement. However, scheduling procedures will prevent the show from airing in Torrance until at least Jan. 23.

“Race and Reason,” a series of mostly talk shows produced by white supremacist Tom Metzger, has been the subject of controversy in Torrance since City Council members discovered that an episode was aired on the city’s public access channel in October.

Although council members denounced the show, Nelson advised that it could not be banned because of the constitutional right of free speech. In a Dec. 28 memorandum, the cable administrator told city officials that additional episodes of the series were to begin airing this week.

Mayor Katy Geissert submitted another tape, “Crimes of Hate,” produced by the Anti-Defamation League as counter-programming for shows such as Metzger’s. The Geissert tape was slated to run at 10:30 p.m., immediately before “Race and Reason” at 11 p.m.

Last Friday, however, Councilman Dan Walker requested that the council review the issue. He argued that the city was “rolling over” by agreeing to air the Metzger series.

Even as the city announced the cancellation late Tuesday, Nelson reiterated his earlier opinion that the city cannot ban the show.

But city officials also said Tuesday that they will study whether the city is obliged to run every episode of “Race and Reason.” Paul Beaton, the Torrance resident who submitted the tapes, has said that he hopes to keep the series on the air for at least the next four years.

“I don’t want to see Torrance end up being the bastion of Tom Metzger’s free-speech-and-racism television programming,” said Walker, who had urged the city to resist airing the show.

Said Geissert: “Whether it’s this group or any other group, there’s the potential for an undue amount of air time being monopolized by a particular group or individual.”

Metzger, 52, of Fallbrook, Calif., is director of a group called White Aryan Resistance. A jury in Portland, Ore., in October found Metzger and three others liable for $12.5 million in the 1988 death of an Ethiopian immigrant beaten by racist skinheads. Jurors concluded that the skinheads were incited by Metzger, who has filed notice that he plans to appeal.

On Wednesday, Metzger questioned whether the tape rejected by Torrance officials is as flawed as the city says.

“This is another way to sabotage us,” Metzger said.

If the tape is actually unusable, Torrance officials could “just show good faith” by substituting another episode rather than delaying the series for two weeks, Metzger said.

Torrance Community Television, Channel 59, typically runs tapes submitted by residents daily for two-week periods. Beaton, who submitted three tapes in the Metzger series, had requested that they run back-to-back over a six-week period, starting this week.

The first episode, originally expected to air Tuesday, was delayed by one day, until Wednesday, after the cable administrator pointed out a misprint in the city cable schedule indicating that the new cycle of cable shows was starting Wednesday, not Tuesday.

The second delay was announced late Tuesday night by City Manager LeRoy J. Jackson, after the series was discussed in a private session by the Torrance City Council in its role as the city’s Cable Television Public Access Foundation.

The tape scheduled to air Wednesday, titled “Race and Reason No. 100: History of Rune Stones,” did not meet the city’s technical requirements, Jackson said after the meeting.

Nelson said the tape’s cancellation did not violate Beaton’s constitutional rights to free speech. “There are immutable laws of physics. No one wants to watch a tape that hisses,” Nelson said.

Torrance officials have repeatedly refused requests to see the tapes before they are aired.

However, Metzger said “History of Rune Stones” focuses on what he describes as Viking relics in Oklahoma. Metzger said the tape, filmed by his son, John, also includes footage of fishing for catfish in Oklahoma lakes.

The episode does not deal specifically with the issue of race, he added.

“There’s a lot of these shows that don’t dwell on race,” Metzger said. “We’ve had black veterans talking about the impact of illegal immigration. “We’ve had anti-Nazi authors on the show, and we’ve had pro-Nazi authors on the show.”

But Metzger did say that a focus of his group, White Aryan Resistance, is the survival of the “white race.” And shows such as the one on rune stones, he said, are “telling white people to be proud of the history of their race.”

So far, Metzger said, he has produced about 150 tapes in the “Race and Reason” series. It is appearing on 46 cable systems nationwide and has been shown in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County, he said.

His shows rarely are turned down by cable systems for technical reasons, he said.

However, Phil Urbina, an official with Daniels Cablevision in San Diego County, said the rune-stone episode that aired on his cable system was of bad quality.

In fact, Urbina, director of community and governmental relations for Daniels, said the cable system has rejected about 50% of the “Race and Reason” tapes submitted in the last six months because of technical problems. He said Daniels Cablevision has warned Metzger that if the program quality does not improve, he could lose his regular Friday afternoon time slot.

The shows have consistently been grainy and some have muffled audio, Urbina said.

Metzger called cable public access “the amateur’s medium” and said that most cable systems use “reasonably broad parameters” to judge quality.

Told that Torrance city officials are reviewing how many episodes should be aired on its cable station, Metzger said, “This is nonsense, because what public access channels have been plagued with for time immemorial is the problem of not having enough shows.”

Any change in the rules will affect other groups submitting shows and will attract more attention to “Race and Reason,” he added.

“My best advice to Torrance would be, ‘Let it go,’ ” Metzger said.

“Now what they’ll do is raise the specter of racism in Torrance, and more people are going to watch it. If a bunch of people are screaming on a corner, you walk over and see what they’re screaming about.”