This book is a comprehensive study of public access television. After briefly covering the history, it studies public policy, current issues (1999), funding, and looks toward the future. Along with simply providing information, this book provides recommendations and useful knowledge for anyone working in Public Access, especially if they had read this book when it was written.

Unlike Shamberg’s Guerilla Television, or Understanding Community Media, this book spends little time on the philosophy or real theory of public access, except as these concepts fit into the regulatory/judicial side of things. Interestingly, it traces the history of court decisions and regulations relating to public access TV from the 1960s until 1999. It shows how public access, since it is largely tied to the government, is always subject to the politics of the day. For example in the early 70s, regulators at the FCC mandated that all large cable networks fund a public access channel. By 1979 the Supreme Court, backtracking on its earlier rulings, denied this regulatory power to the FCC, stating that only congress was allowed such to make such decisions. Overall, I found this book to be a solid general introduction to public access TV from a sort of policy perspective.

Linder, Laura R. Public Access Television: America’s Electronic Soapbox. Praeger, 1999. Print