 Activists, artists, and citizens from nearly all walks of life and perspectives have struggled to reach beyond the limits of mainstream media. Whether it's Fox News or the New York Times, Rush Limbaugh, or Brian Williams, people say they are tired of being talked to or overlooked. They seek to exercise their own rights to free speech, to fulfill a need to hear from independent voices. They exercise their rights and fulfill their needs by creating new avenues for speech, by inventing new forms of communication, and by seizing the microphone to speak to their community. This movement did not begin and does not end with the internet or social media. It is a movement as old as the dawn of mass media. This series will highlight the contributions of alternative media and the challenges citizens face in a political environment that seems to reward only those with the most money. A political environment that does not necessarily reward those with the best ideas or those who serve the critical information needs of their community. We're looking beyond mainstream media. My name is Mark Lloyd. I'm the director of the Media Policy Initiative here at the New America Foundation. And very pleased to have this conversation with Kim Spencer. And Kim and I have known each other for a long time. And beginning with our conversations about starting this new service that you were very excited about many, many years ago, that ultimately was called Link TV. And before we talk about that, could you talk about your work and your interest in both media and in international affairs generally? Well, it's great to be reconnecting with you, Mark. I worked as a documentary maker and as a journalist. I worked at ABC News and I produced independent documentaries for public television and usually on issues, global issues. And that came out of some work back early in the 1980s when I did a documentary about the nuclear arms race and it really raised the question of, well, what about the Russians? So I started going to Russia and back in the 80s created these two-way satellite dialogues called Space Bridges that started out as really spontaneous almost events that linked Americans and Russians who during the great superpower battle were unable to ever really talk to each other. We connected them face-to-face, two-way by satellite. That got me really interested in the power of satellites. So my partners, Evelyn Messinger and David Hoffman and I created something called InterNews which began working in many countries around the world to kind of promote democracy through independent media. So it really was, it sounds to me like there are these old recurring dreams about the power of media to connect us globally. And just because the ability to see and hear and actually communicate across cultures can be facilitated by all this media and this is the work you were doing. Right, and you know, when you travel a lot you see how television in the other parts of the world presents so many different perspectives like the BBC and Russian TV and they're all different perspectives on basically the same news story. And that was an early interest, kind of the Rashamanov. Let's take a look at how the different parts of the world look at the world from the point of view of their television. Now, this also seems to me and I think it's important to note the distinctions between that work and something like Voice of America. So compare what you were doing with the Space Bridge and InterNews with maybe the Voice of America service. Well, I think it's all about independence from your source of funding and from government control is key. And that's what independent journalists are all about and our democracy is based on that. And so it's been very important to try to find an outlet for that and that's really was the challenge because, you know, after you could pick up a camera and go out and shoot your own news, but you still had to get by a gatekeeper to get it on the air. And more and more we were finding as some of us worked together that the programs that we'd make even couldn't even get on public television, particularly anything on about an international issue or that had subtitles just really couldn't get on public TV. Yeah. And so here you are. You were really sort of at the pinnacle of where many people aim now. You were actually doing documentaries at ABC at a major U.S. network. How could you possibly step down from that and not continue to do that work? I mean, isn't that sort of the end goal for many journalists? Well, it seemed like and, boy, the budgets were great and the access was great. But, you know, there was already a conventional wisdom and I think the turning point might have been when Disney bought ABC News. All of a sudden it was no longer that these networks programs were kind of the crown jewels of the network. They were just a profit center like anything else. The conventional wisdom at the time was that international stories just didn't get ratings. That Americans really were not that interested in the rest of the world. So this service of direct satellite news or television became available. Of course, people were using satellites to do all sorts of other things to communicate with before. But the idea that you could actually get at your home, and this was a commercial service, a multiple video provider via satellite was unique. How did the opportunity come about where you could have something that was not commercial, that was not simply something you could get on broadcast television or that was not simply another commercial operation? Where did this notion come about that direct TV or whatever the other satellite television provider would be that they would need to set aside something for non-commercial purposes? Well, actually it's a great story and there are not that many success stories about an opportunity where community groups and individuals who believe strongly in the power of independent media actually made a change and it was through the FCC. So the FCC did something good. They did and that happened in 1999 when the FCC agreed after a lot of pressure and negotiation to require direct TV and dish network, the two satellite providers to set aside a certain percentage, somewhere like around 4% of their channel capacity for independent channels that are run by 501C3 nonprofits. That was the rule and when that announcement came out, one of us had read us, it was a footnote in an article somewhere that said this was about to happen and the idea of getting our own channel, that drew a lot of support and people started joining the effort and we worked together and brought in the organization ITVS, which you are the chair of at the time, and a couple other independent groups joined with the inter-news to put in a proposal with the thanks of a really far ahead thinking philanthropist at the MacArthur Foundation who said, well, if you can really get a license then we'll back you at least partially for the first three years. Somehow, we wrote the proposal, we got it together, we imagined all the great things that you could do on television and direct TV selected us. We had five weeks to get on the air. They gave us the deadline, December 15, 1999. We had about five weeks to put together a 24-hour channel or they were going to give it to the next channel which was already an existing cable channel and which would have been a religious broadcaster which ended up getting a lot of these channels because there was just no way to start these things. Link TV, an independent national television channel with an expanse of vision connecting Americans with the larger world. Without censorship or commercials, Link TV presents honest opinions and diverse voices that go unheard in American media. Breaking with convention. We bring you challenging documentaries on global issues along with moving personal stories. From human rights to the environment and sustainable development. From world health to America's working poor. Link TV showcases gripping stories of people caught up in the conflict. And in a time of war, we bring you unfiltered news from the Middle East and our Peabody Award-winning news digest, Mosaic. Global Pulse presents critical information for understanding other perspectives. Link TV offers an entertaining mix of international feature films and a unique selection of world music videos with a social conscience and a global beat. Broadcast via satellite and on select cable channels, Link TV now reaches one in every four American homes. Original series are streamed on the World Wide Web to inform and activate global citizens. If I had to rename Link TV, I would call it Integrity TV. I love this channel and I'm a member and you should become a member too. So the idea of Link TV, Link Connection, you get it? So get connected and stay on Link TV. Link TV illuminating the true potential of television. Bold, honest, independent, international, moving you to make the world a better place. Link TV. Television without borders. It was amazing work that you were able to do in a very short bit of time, both in terms of pulling together the programming and working with all the characters that you needed to work with to get it up and running. Now, let's see if we can understand. You got free access to satellite service. That's right. We got a channel on Direct TV and on Dish Network, which at the time were 12 million homes, but now a third of all TV in America received that. And we were given a full channel on both of those services and we called it Link TV. What does it mean to have free access though? Does that mean? What does that mean? Well, the asterisk down there was that this didn't come along with any sort of business model. There was no government funding. There was no corporation from public broadcasting funding. No commercials were allowed, so basically we're allowed. No commercials were allowed. Yeah, this was a non-commercial channel that had to abide by all the FCC rules that PBS channels had to abide by, but we didn't qualify for CPB funding. So it's been a struggle to this day to find a way to build up the support that you need to run a TV channel. Yeah. And just to connect to, just to transmit your programming to the satellite service. What was that? Free? Was that? No. In fact, the rules were that we would have to pay to direct TV and dish network the fair amount of their costs to put us up, which they arbitrarily set at around $10,000 per month. So not only did we give them our programming for free, we were paying them on a monthly basis. And the original contract was a revocable one month agreement, which meant that we had no guarantee that they would keep us up there. But amazingly enough, it has worked out pretty much for the good. And here we are. We've got a 24-hour-7 channel. LinkTV.org is where you can find it if you can't get it on satellite, but it's a channel that has a mix of documentaries on social issues, news from around the world harking back to my initial interests in the news, and then also incredible cultural programming, world music and films, and just all sorts of programs just from the incredible diversity that we see around the world. So one of the things that you put on, which was fascinating to see, was a program that's very popular on Pacifica radio network. Could you talk a little bit about that? Well, Amy Goodman and Democracy Now are a mainstay of progressive media in this country. And it started out as a radio program. And about eight years ago, Amy started to put a camera in the room with her every morning, and eventually that became a really excellent daily news program. And Democracy Now continues to be on LinkTV and on free speech TV, which is the other independent channel that got on through the same arrangement. And talk a little bit about some of the programs that you're most proud of and the history of LinkTV. Well, I would have to say that it's the documentaries that, you know, hours after hours of documentaries that just don't get shown in this country. And it's not all on global issues. We really also wanted to portray the unheard voices in America. One of our first series was documentaries on the Native American experience that had never been shown. We ended up having 30 documentaries that we found that just had never been shown. So that's been, I think, the most important impact. But one of our news programs called Mosaic, World News in the Middle East, ended up becoming very important. We had carried programs that tried to give you an understanding of what was going on in the Arab world. But after 9-11, all of a sudden Americans were saying, why do they hate us? What's going on out there? And so we started picking up off the satellite broadcasters from across the Middle East and created a program, a daily half-hour news from the Middle East, just taking chunks of the news. No editorial, just translating the Arabic or the Hebrew for the Israeli TV or the Persian from the Iranians. And that program ended up winning a Peabody Award, drew a lot of attention to Link and more than 2,700 daily episodes up until earlier this year. Is this the Iraq War you've never seen on American TV? Unfiltered, uncensored, unafraid to venture into new territory. Watch Mosaic, the award-winning news digest bringing you the latest news directly from 30 different broadcasters in the Middle East. Now you can watch Mosaic any time, any place with a Mosaic video podcast. Just go to linktv.org slash podcast, your portal to Mosaic and other Link TV original series. Now what happened this year? Well, what happened this year is a culmination of our problems of the business model. I think Link TV grew and grew to the point that recently our audience, which amazingly, even with the budget problems, just jumped up another 20% so that something like 8 million Americans watch regularly, they tell us, an average of 2.5 hours a week. So that's a lot of people still focused on an independent channel. But it's always been difficult. We depend on a lot of those viewers to pay the bills. And after 2008, the drop-off, this hit public television as well, the drop-off in individual contributions toward public media and also the foundations, their endowments were hit. So some of the major foundations that supported Link, the funding just began to shrink. And so with that limited funding, we've had to really retool and find new ways to be in this new media environment. One of the things that we did last year was a merger with another non-profit broadcaster. KCET is a venerable public media institution celebrating its 50th year in Southern California. And we merged with KCET, now we're called KCET Link, and we got a lot of synergies from that. And hopefully we'll be able to build up a bigger bank account as a team. Well, that's great. Now, can I watch some of the programming from Link TV on something other than direct TV? Yes. In some communities, Link TV is carried different hours of the day on local cable in the Bay Area. But now would it be carried on the public access operations? In San Francisco, it's a public station, KRCB, that carries us at different times. And we're also carried on a public access channel. And in different places around the country, Peg stations carry Link. And it's interesting we get that programming out to them through a really interesting organization called Peg Media, which distributes the programs by FTP files. So now we started out on satellite. We were created because we got ourselves on satellite. But of course, a lot's changed in 14 years about delivery technology. I mean, for one thing, there was no YouTube then. But there was no streaming video or ability to... And now you can watch pretty much every Link program on the web at linktv.org. So you don't need to have a satellite receiver at your home. Oh, that's great. So if I want to, I can just stream this service. Now, do you have any agreements with Netflix or with Hulu? A lot of our programs, our original programs are on Hulu. And some of the things that we're really proud as one of our best programs is an original series that we've produced for nearly eight years called Earth Focus, which is the longest running environmental series on American TV, which is pretty sad what it says about the rest of American TV that, you know, a small operation like Link can have a weekly environmental series. From preserving the knowledge of Shaman healers in the Amazon to selling off old growth forests in Russia's Far East from the destruction of Australia's coral reefs to biotech crops in Africa. It continues to use genetically engineered ingredients. Link TV takes you around the world to understand the battles being waged to save our planet. It has been actually predicted that by the year 2030 that all the coral reefs in the world may actually be dead. As other networks cancel their environmental series, Link TV is the only U.S. broadcaster to air regular installments of several environmental series, including Earth Report. The logger's assault is relentless. And our original magazine series on the environment, Earth Focus, a joint project with the international group Friends of the Earth. Coral reefs are the canary in the cage for the biosphere. In Link TV's original weekly series, Spotlight, we also investigate environmental issues such as global warming and the revealing exposé, Rising Waters. Through personal stories of Pacific Islanders, this Spotlight report puts a human face on the debate over international climate change. Link TV also searches the planet for the best independent documentaries about wildlife conservation and the environment. A fall from freedom documents the tragic history of the marine park industry, where the killer whale, beluga whale and dolphin are torn from their close-knit families in violent and often illegal captures. And the Shaman's apprentice follows one man as he tries to preserve the dying traditions of the Shaman healers of the Amazon. Shulte said that these native healers were nature's greatest geniuses when it came to understanding plants and their healing abilities. Nowhere else on the airwaves will you find a network as committed to showing the battles being waged to save our environment. Education. Information. Opinion. We'd like for the rest of America to understand. Link TV. Your connection to the planet. If you had the chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission and the chairman of the House Committee with some oversight of the FCC and maybe the chair of the Senate Committee with some oversight of the FCC. And you needed to convince them of the, not only the importance of this set aside for satellite service but of policies that might actually need to be changed so that this could be sustainable by ordinary human beings. What would you suggest? Well, it's a tough one because the FCC, as great as it was in creating this opportunity in 1999, is a regulatory organization and doesn't have any sort of funding capability. And in this country, we don't have the history, say, of the BBC being paid for essentially by a tax on everybody's television set and the tradition of doing that. And only in a couple countries around the world is there really a vibrant public media. In this country, it's always at the risk of federal control. So I'm not sure that there is a silver bullet through the FCC. Now, I think it's critical, though, and it's the kind of work that you've been involved in over the years, and I know, is that the FCC needs to stay on top of the whole sector. And really, the money in politics, money and corporations, they do control what Americans get to see. Well, so why couldn't, at the very least, there be money for link TV from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Well, that's an argument that we would make, but I think when you look at the big stations that depend on what little money there is from the CBB, that's difficult to chop up their money at all to add to more services. So, I mean, we're just having to be creative, and I think it's the viewers that vote with their contributions. And the interesting thing is that from the research that we do, we find the diversity of an audience that's looking for a different point of view that it's not just breaching to the converted here. It's a diverse audience, and it's one that also watches Fox News. People want to know, particularly young people, they're not just buying it from one source anymore. With their device, they can click around and pick out a choice of places to look for. So it's almost the opportunity to be, so what's the role, then, of a broadcaster? These days, if people have millions of choices being uploaded every week on YouTube, what's the role of a broadcaster with a 24-7 service? Well, I think part of it is to really provide a curatorial and editorial vision. And Link's vision was not just, you know, trying to get a program that's going to raise more money, so let's go follow the patterns, but there was always a social mission. And the social mission was a global one, the importance of understanding different cultures, but it's also the social mission of you the viewer need to get involved. So from the very beginning, Link was about, you know, that person on the couch, you know, get up off the couch after you watch the program, you know, turn the TV off, get up, do something. And that was some of the earlier things that we really experimented when the Internet first came out, was how could we actually engage our viewers and give them tools and links to other organizations working on issues. And we're seeing now other channels getting into that. A good example of that one, and we're really watching is Pivot, which is the new channel that Participant Meeting and Jeff Skoll have launched, you know. And there's a lot of money there, and maybe, you know, maybe they'll be able to move the ball a little bit further and also keep challenging us, you know, because it's great to have the competition. There's got to be more than just like one chattel out there, you know, with this message.