 Welcome to the When Free Speech Gets Messy panel. My name is Bobby Luciae, I use any old pronouns and I work at CCTV Center for Media and Democracy in Burlington, so just down the road in the old north end of Burlington. And I, we put together this panel, I think because this is a topic that at least at CCTV we've been chewing on quite a bit within our staff and our board. We have found ourselves revisiting some of the sort of foundational principles of public access regarding free speech and making sure that we continue to allow the free exchange of ideas in our access center and in our coverage while also making sure that we're paying attention to and attending to the potential harm that can come from speech and where it leads. So I'm going to just give sort of a brief overview of the topic before I hand it off to some folks who have been in this work much longer than I have and who are going to share some of their experiences and perspectives on this topic. So our panelists today were joined by Rob Perry, who's the Executive Director of Mad River Valley TV in Weitzfield, Vermont. We're also joined by Jessica Smeiser, who is the Executive Director of the other CCTV, which is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as Tony Riddle, who's the Senior Vice President of Community Media at BRIC in Brooklyn. So thank you all so much for being here and joining us in this conversation. So this is the plan. Generally we've got 90 minutes here, so we're going to start with some sort of context. And then we're going to hear from the panel for about 45 minutes. We'll have some questions that we've prepared, and then we'll hand it over to all of you to ask some questions. We're going to try and break out into groups. I know this room isn't totally set up for that, but we'll try to have some time for folks to be able to sort of share what they're chewing on, what this topic brings up for them in some smaller settings for about 20 minutes before we come back together as a group and close out. And we'll be here until about 11.45. So before I jump in, I just wanted to read the room a little bit. What are folks hoping to get out of this session? What are folks looking to hear about or talk about? And I can pass the microphone. Also, I'll make a note that we have one microphone, and we're recording this session. So even if you have a great loud voice, it would be awesome if you could just use the microphone to jump in with any questions or comments that you want to share. So does anyone want to share sort of an intention or something that they'd like to get out of the session? Oh, did you? I will. We've got a bit of a tangle here. Oh, there we go. Hi, I'm Jeremy. I'm from Burwick, Maine. And I'm very new to this world. So I'm excited to have sort of back to basics overview as it relates to free speech and community media. Yes. Jordan, could you just come up? That would be awesome. Yeah, I think I'm looking to hear from other public access centers and hear what they've been hearing the other people have been having the same conversations or if people have been having no conversations about this. Yeah. Seth Mobley from the Media Factory here in Burlington. And I've been in this industry since 2006. So I'm mostly interested in hearing where our industry is at collectively, contributing to that conversation as well, given how much the world has changed around us, prevalence of misinformation and hate speech. And yeah, just kind of seeing where we are now. Thanks, Seth. Yeah. I'm Halena Lescheck. I'm the operations manager in Brownboro, Vermont, down south, Brownboro Community Television. We are searching for a new executive director. And I have to say that this question gets brought up by people who are not familiar with public access and they get very nervous about it. So this is, I think, a good way for us to kind of collect safe language to help get people into this world and not be afraid of this area in particular. And I'm also very curious on the rearranging of policies same as everyone else. I've been doing this for three years, FYI. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much. OK, those are some good table setting that is generally also what I was hoping, expecting to talk about, so that's good news. So I wanted to just present some context for this conversation because we've found that we're seeing that the meaning and conception of free speech is sort of evolving right now and the implications of it are also evolving. So this is a graph from the Southern Polypathy Law Center. It's a graph showing the number of identified hate groups in the United States from 1999 to 2022. And last year, there was the highest amount of registered hate groups in the country, and that was a huge spike from the year before, almost a 80% jump, which is scary. We've also seen that online social media companies such as Facebook have been seeing a rise in hate speech on their platforms. And that particularly, this is data that goes all the way through 2023, the summer of 2023, and there was a huge spike in hateful content that Facebook was observing and taking down on that platform. Next, I'll show a couple of examples of polling data. I'm sorry if this is really small. Can people read this? It's far away, but I'll walk you through it. So apologies for the focus on political party in this data, but basically, this is some data about how folks are viewing the issue of whether offensive content online is being taken seriously enough, and there's an increasing divide in the country between folks who feel that online content is being excused too often versus folks who are trying to protect, essentially, the right to post-offensive content online. There's also an increasing divide between people who are hoping to protect the right to speak freely online and people who are hoping to protect the right to feel safe and welcome online. Here's another dense set of data here, but this is some data from the Knight Foundation that's showing the difference broken down by party around what folks actually see as a valid way to exercise their free speech right. And we're seeing that, for example, racial injustice protests, 85% of Democrats see racial injustice protests as a valid way to express their free speech right, whereas only 56% of Republicans feel that way. But then on the other side of things, for looking at 2020 election misinformation, 73% of Republicans see the protests against certifying the 2020 election as a valid expression of free speech in this country, whereas only 39% of Democrats see those protests as a valid exercise of free speech. So just kind of pointing out that there's sort of an increasing divide between what people actually see as a valid expression of free speech and that people are increasingly just seeing the mechanism of free speech as just an avenue for their view of the world, and they're increasingly seeing speech that they don't agree with as invalid expressions of free speech. And this is just a note from the same poll that showed that when folks were asked, how much do you feel like the First Amendment protects your right to speak freely, black Americans were only 61% of black Americans felt that their right to free speech was actually protected, whereas the rest of the country was more around the 85% to 90% mark. So that's just some sort of context in the national scale. At CCTV, as I said, we've been having a conversation about this for a long time, but we've been specifically as a staff focused on this and as a board focused on this for the last few months, we hosted a conversation between two local activists who had different perspectives on free speech recently. This was actually about a month ago. And I'm just going to play it's about a three minute clip. To put it crudely, everyone's got a hole in their rear, just like everyone's got an opinion. What I worry about is when people organize to harm minorities, and many of the groups, that I fight against, like the Vanguard America, which became the Patriot Front, they organize to hurt people. Jews will not replace us as what they chanted in Charlottesville. And it was Vanguard America that brought James Fields there. And as a researcher on the far right, many times I watch people's speech escalate and create these massacres, like the guy who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh. The law is not governed by feelings. The law is governed by our constitution. Under our constitution, there is freedom to be hateful. If people are organized to harm people, it's a crime. Go to the police about it. Well, the police don't usually do anything about it. To me, there is no such thing as hate speech. If it's speech, it's allowed under the United States Constitution. And in a sense, speech also protects against violence. I believe that because when you talk to each other, that's a way that you're not going to beat each other to a pulp. Speech, hate speech is a lot like radioactivity. I released 10 curies of iodine 131 over Burlington. It's a horrible thing. Some sort of nuclear accident happened. Cancer goes up 10%. But I can't prove any particular person got cancer from this particular incident. This is one of the things that mindless pro-nuclear people. I am pro-nuclear, but people who are mindless in it, like to say, you can't prove that this person got cancer from being near a three mile island, but there's an increase of cancer near a three mile island. When you have hate speech, it's very much like spewing radioactivity. You cannot necessarily draw a straight line or prove it pedantically like you might in court. But as humans, we have to realize releasing poison into the environment, whether it be a strontium 131 from a nuclear bomb tested in the desert, or constantly talking dehumanizing speech. Yes, both of these are toxic and both of these have the potential to kill. Can you prove a straight line association between them? No, you can't. So you would have an organization like CCTV limit or shut down that speech? Yes. And then, so that's where I come from. Or at the very least, have it directly opposed. Directly opposed. If you can't do it. That's not what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. More conversation. More conversation. Yes. So that was a conversation that happened at CCTV just a month ago. And I think, interesting to note that those folks were on very different, they're often on the same side of a lot of other issues in our community, but they were on very different sides of this issue. And at the same time, they both kind of landed on a similar conclusion, which is that we need to be having more conversations in our community in a safe way. So, oops. Let's see if I can get back to full screen here. How do I do that? Okay, so here are some of the questions that were actually, before I get into these questions, I think I'm just going to ask our panelists to introduce themselves and I'll come back to their names on the screen. And I would love for each of you to just introduce yourselves and your role and what brings you to this conversation. And then we can jump into some more specific questions about free speech. Hello, my name's Rob Perry. I am the executive director of the Mad River Valley Public Access TV station. For those of you not from Vermont, Mad River Valley is where Sugarbush and Mad River Glen ski resorts are, we're a resort community. And, you know, interestingly around the whole, you know, public access and cable side is that being a resort community, we have different impacts of cord cutting and finances and we have an interesting community which is sort of split between second home owners which is a big portion of the property in the area. We have many visitors who come obviously particularly during the ski season but increasingly during the summer and people like me who are sort of in a second career, you know, this is like, I'm sort of retired although I have a couple of businesses and I do this and we have a big, you know, sort of retired community that's very active and active in, you know, with the TV station as well as active in the community. So it's a very interesting place to be and we have some interesting producers who produce some interesting content which is what sort of brings me here because we do have some active non-traditional thought that we have on the air and something we've looked at and talked about, you know, what do we do with this content? So, and so that's it. Thank you. I'm Anthony or Tony Riddle. I'm the Senior Vice President for Community Media at Brick in Brooklyn. Actually, I started there as the Director of Free Speech Services and my daughter who was about 10 at the time said, well, it sounds really weird that you're directing Free Speech Services, you know, and so there's a little bit of that in this conversation as well. I started as a producer, community producer in Atlanta around 1980 when some of your parents were still in high school and I think the issues were very different at that time. You know, I ended up working in the programming department. I think that Free Speech is really the altar for this community that we work in and that regardless of how you approach it, it really is the initial issue but that at that time the matters that were subject to people looking at them were very different. It seems like we've moved to where the essential kind of speech that we want to talk about is hate speech. But at that time, a lot of it was borderline, obscene programming and, you know, just a wide variety of different kinds of things that you don't see as much now and so I'm just noting, you know, as we begin the conversation, that our role as an access center has changed a lot in the past, you know, quarter of a century to where I think because there's so many other forms of speech that are available that people, a lot of the stuff that would have been on our channels before has migrated. Like we have next to no pornographic or near pornographic images anymore. There's other places for that to take place. You know, at the time that we started, we were the only game in town and so I think it's important when we talk that we talk about like really clear principles of speech and not necessarily about current content so that as things change, you have a basis for running your channel that can apply to any kind of speech that comes up. Hi there, my name is Jessica Smeiser. I am the executive director at Cambridge Community Television, the other CCTV as was mentioned, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I started working at CCTV Cambridge on January 4th, 2021 and someone just mentioned that during their ED search there's been questions about free speech and I was new to community media as a leader. I had been a member producer years ago, have background in music business and arts and culture leadership. So when I had some time with the previous executive director on that day, January 4th, 2021, I said, you know, you have this be live program where anyone can just come in off the street and have 30 minutes on TV. So what are your rules around speech and how, what people bring to that live television? And she said, well, they can say anything they want as long as they don't incite insurrection and she sort of chuckled. So two days later, it wasn't so funny anymore. So I think this just, what other people have mentioned, we have to think about ourselves in a world that has a context and is changing and one of the biggest things I've been thinking about in the context of what is ours to do is 30 years ago when our live channel started, when people needed a platform for speech who didn't have a platform for speech, there weren't all these other platforms. Right now there's a lot of platforms for people. Foreign platforms, Twitter, arts platforms, there's a lot of ways for people to have easy access to bringing their opinions and getting on their soapbox. So what is our role now that people can choose which platform they want to express themselves on and how do we make sure that our community members, our staff, our member producers feel heard but also feel safe? Thank you all. Sorry, thanks for passing along this microphone here. So I'm just gonna drive us back to our questions. So let's start maybe by just asking, just sort of setting the table with this first question basically to phrase it a different way, what is the policy in place at each of your access centers around speech? Is there any, how do you determine what speech is allowed on your channel and at your center and where do you draw the line if there is a line around speech that's not allowed at your center? You know, it's a very good question because we, you know, we're small so we've got the staff of one and a half and I'm the half and I'm not even actually a full half at the moment so. But we have, you know, we manage our content by having a production or producers manual and it's very specific as to what content we want to show, what you can say, you know, so there's a section and all about, you know, you can't, you know, inside insurrection, that's actually in there. You can no hate speech as defined by federal and state law and things like that but it doesn't say anything about accuracy and factual nature of what goes on. But we also don't do editorial review so we're not like watching everything before it goes on. We might look at the, you know, we don't do, we actually don't do anything live except for the War and Fourth of July parade and, you know, school concerts and some sporting events now. So we're not doing, we don't have people walking in and saying whatever is on their mind. But we do also focus on, you know, we have priorities of what we actually will put on the air. We give first priority to local producers of people in the valley who produce content. You know, Vermont producers is kind of next. Things relevant, you know, from across the nation that are relevant to our community. You know, that we mostly, it is, you know, environmental and nature programs and things like that. We don't, you know, there's not, I do get calls from people with very politically oriented shows, they'd like us to show it. And so in that case, we're always like, you know, it sounds very interesting but, you know, you're not on our priority list, right? You know, priority is local, Vermont, you know, of interest to the community and then national, otherwise. So that's basically how we manage it. But we don't review it because we also don't want somebody to say, well, you looked at it and said it was okay, I disagree and we get into this thing where sort of our policy is we don't have the staff and we're not making a judgment on these things. But these are our rules. You sign that when you agree that you're gonna produce something and you have to abide by that. And, you know, our answer is if we get complaints, we would just take you off the air, that's all. So. Yeah, I think that's a really good summary of what has to happen. First of all, I mean, just on the most basic, if you review programs and decide to put them on, then you're liable for the content because you've reviewed it. And if you review it and decide not to put it on, then you're also liable for abridging somebody's free speech rights. So, I mean, that's a basic thing, is that we have to be able to trust and put the programs on. Community standard is really important. You know, what you do in Burlington is gonna be different from what's done in Manhattan and what's acceptable. You know, when I was in Atlanta, there was a lot to do about people cursing at that time. You know, they didn't want people cursing. Manhattan is a free-for-all. You know, it was pretty wide open there and I think what was most important was to have material rules that you could measure. So that, for instance, I remember one time early on, there was a program that had two men kissing and the city administrator was very upset about this and I asked her, you know, but what about a man and a woman kissing? And she said, well, that's fine, but you can't have two men kissing. And so this is what taught me about materiality. You either allow people to kiss or you don't allow people to kiss. Either one is probably acceptable, although it can be argued, but it has to not be with respect to a certain person or a certain belief system. It has to be something that you can apply all the way across the board. This is for the protection of not only speech but of your company. From my point of view, speech, again, is the highest element and I think where, I hope we'll talk about it, but I think where we run into problem is that people don't understand what free speech is and they don't understand what hate speech is, where it fits in the law. And these, I mean, I've had people say, well, you know, that thought you're expressing is obscene. Well, obscenity actually has a very clear definition in the law, well, very clear up to a point. But it's not speech, right? And so it's helpful for people to understand that a free speech forum is a free speech forum and that Facebook is not a free speech forum. Facebook is a privately or publicly owned company that has its rules. And by the way, I just want to chastise them because if they had come to public access and asked us about managing speech on Facebook, they wouldn't have run into all those problems with Congress because we know how to do it and they don't know how to do it. They actively went in and tried to decide what could be said and what can't be said. That makes them a publisher and they're now liable for everything. They lost their right as a, what do you call it, carrier? I forget, to be protected against the speech of the people on the platform because they intervened. And so I would like us not to end up in that situation that it's really important to allow people to speak. And then finally, I think what a lot of people call hate speech is actually really important to be on the channels. One more story, I won't hold the mic all the time, but when I was in Atlanta, there was a program out called Race and Reason, it's not around now. But it was like one of the early programs that showed skinheads, one-week clansmen, you know, it was a talk show and they would interview people from all of these various groups that were on the chart there. And being in Atlanta, the mostly Black City Council wanted it taken off. Atlanta at that time was about 60% black or something like that. And I just felt like if they were willing to talk about these things in front of a largely black audience, we were glad to have them. They were a national program, but I felt like this was good for people to be able to see, to be able to understand what people were doing. So the guy, long story short, the guy that produced the program got put in jail for a hate act, go figure. It was Tom Metzger and he went to jail, you know who it was. Yeah, so the local producer asked if he could produce the show locally, Dr. Poinsett. And we said, sure, you have to take the class, you have to put together a voluntary crew and you can do this as long as you don't call for specific acts of violence against people. So he did that, but to get a crew, you have to work on other people's shows. So he was working on the Muslim show, he was working on the gay show, he was working on all these different shows. They were working on his show, they'd go have production meetings and so forth. And he eventually went to Tampa instead because he said, you know, Mr. Riddle, I'm not getting traction here, I need to go someplace where they're gonna pull my show so I can get some press. And so he went on to Tampa and they pulled the show and then it got national press and he was very happy about that. But that comes to that first question, which is actually two questions and I wanna point this out because this came up in Manhattan recently, which is that there is a difference between the speech that can take place on the channel, which should be as completely unfettered as possible as compared to the speech that takes place in your center. So you can say things on your program that you want, but we don't, in Brooklyn, we don't tolerate hateful activity in the center. We demand that the center be a physically safe place for people no matter how they are and so forth. And I think this is a real distinction. You know, you can have books about war in the library, but you can't have a war in the library, right? And so that's really two questions there. That's a really good point. So to answer the question of how do you determine what speech is allowed on your channel, and I like that you split it up. So just I'll just answer that first question, which is how do you determine what speech is allowed on your channel? We don't really police the speech at all. As I mentioned, the only thing that is in the agreement between the live producers and us is that they can't incite insurrection. And honestly, I'm a little fuzzy on what inciting insurrection is these days. I mean, everybody's got a code. There's all sorts of things. They could be, and I just can't, I don't understand. So that's the problem. But for the most part, sort of to my surprise, our producers, our live producers, most of them are what I call soapboxers. They have one thing that they talk about every time they come on. They have one issue that is really important to them and they come on and they talk about that. We have a guy who is opposed to laws that say you can't smoke in restaurants and that's all he talks about every week. And he gets guests calling in from all over the country about that. And it's a thing. And for the most part, they are really, you know, to use a lack of a better word, they're well-behaved. They stick to their issue. They don't say things that are either offensive or hateful on their TV show. What they do is they say it on Twitter. And so where we've run into problems, when we've run into problems, is we have a couple of producers, one in particular, who when he does his show, he speaks about politics, local politics, that's his thing. When he does his live show, he is really straight talking about local politics. He's snarky sometimes, he thinks he's funny. But on Twitter, he is actually racist, homophobic. He's a turf. He says things that are pretty awful. And he also, this year, so just to say, for a couple years, the issue has been that people who are rightfully offended by some of the things he says, have tagged us on Twitter, tagged CCTV on Twitter, and said, how do you allow this person to be a producer on your channel when he's saying these kind of things? He never shows those kind of things on our channel. And even so, even if he did, to your point, he probably could. But it does set up an environment with staff and other members that sometimes makes them feel attacked or unsafe because of his speech outside of our channels. And then he decided to run for city council this year. So that was a dream. So of course, he's running for city council, then now all of this speech that he's put out there ends up in the Boston Globe, ends up in the Harvard Crimson, ends up in Cambridge Day. Screenshots, there's a whole Reddit thread. Because he's elevated his profile, all this speech is now out there for people to see. And his association with CCTV is often mentioned. So we are at a point now where in talking to the board and amongst the staff, is there a necessity for us to have some kind of blanket statement about what it actually means to be a community media center? Because I think a lot of the criticism we've received comes from a misunderstanding about what we are. We're not ABC News, we're not CNN. We don't hire producers to go live on air. It's a community access and we believe in radical access. But often people don't really understand what our purpose is. So what we've been thinking about doing is trying to have more of a campaign of awareness about what it actually means for us to have that radical access. And what is our place in the community? This is not a hired paid producer, for example. And I'll finally just end this whole anecdote about this particular person by talking about my personal moral and ethical stance around this whole thing. It's been really challenging in one way because I believe, wholeheartedly in free speech and I believe that as much as I don't like hearing it, he has the right to say these things. But he did cross a line for me and it's come up a little bit here, I think. In that, in one of his tweets, he tagged the local hate group with the date and time and location of a drag queen story hour. I mean, I just get chills even talking about it now. And nothing happened, thank God, but, you know. So there are lines that people can cross and it's scary, really scary. So what is our responsibility in that? You know, if something had happened, you know, that would have really been something that I think we would have felt even more repercussions and felt more heavy about. But even so, he's still out there. He didn't win the city council seat, that's good news. He got 280, he got 280 votes, that's bad news. But yeah, so that's what we're dealing with in our, what's the part that says where it gets messy? That's our mess right now. So that's, you bring up a really good point because you're at the point where somebody's close to making actionable speech where they're getting ready to make a call for action or they're making it, but it's sort of dog whistled in such a way, so that's actually sort of hard to deal with, right? That is also something that we are trying to figure out. How do we, what is incitement of violence actually mean? And because it's no longer necessarily, you know, just a call to action, sometimes it's sort of an implied call to action. So there's a question I can ask there, but I think I want to just open it up and see if anyone, if there are any questions from you folks out there right now, if anyone wants to come up and ask a question. Yeah, sorry, could you come? I'm gonna get as far as the, I see what's just here, so thank you. Yeah, hi, my name is Ashley, I'm from Boston Neighborhood Network, and the one question that kept coming up in my mind after reading the questions up here and hearing you guys talk is, for me personally, I also believe very strongly in free speech, but for me in doing shows at my station, what I always see is the same person come up and talk about the same things, but there's no counterpoint, which I think is the important part of free speech, is you learn and what you think changes, but I feel like I have this same person come up, say the same thing all the time, but there's no counterpoint to their argument. And how can I cultivate that at my station where I'm not a producer, I'm just here to facilitate someone else's free speech, but to improve my community and their views on the world and our community around us, I think it's really important to have an opposing view, and how can I cultivate that at my station? Could we start with you this time, Jessica? Yeah, I'm just gonna try this out. So I think that's a great question, and we think about that a lot, so we have our programming, we have this live programming that people have access to, but we also produce our own programming. So we actually program a lot of things that are actually, I don't know if it's so sneaky, we think it's sneaky, counter-programming, so our live programming. So we try and bring the programs that we produce, we try and very actively bring in voices that may counter some of the programming that's showing up on the live show. I mean, one of the problems I have with the setup of our, it's called BeLive, is it really favors the loudest voice. You have to be really comfortable walking into a studio and sitting down behind a microphone and saying whatever the heck you want, and not everyone has that confidence or bravado or there's a lot of other words you could use. And so we really try and actively go out into the community and find counter-programming and produce it ourselves so that we can make sure that we don't always favor the loudest voice in the program that we show on our channels. That helps. Yeah, that's true. Sometimes you just have to be able to provide a lower, a lower step to access for some people. But also I always like to think of us as being like a spider in the web. And so when you get upset with one program and you call us, that's our contact with you and we can encourage you or make it easy for you to do the programming. So it's not just us trying to decide what the opposite programming is, but letting people volunteer themselves to do it. Yeah, we have two producers who generate a lot of content and they have their opinions of things and I would love to have a counter-opinion and one of them is a little extreme and sometimes unpleasant in his approach. And it would be really nice to have another voice but it's just hard. You gotta find the producers locally and as I said in the beginning, we're a small community. So people aren't necessarily always stepping up to have the counterpoint kind of message and program because it's the people who have these extreme, you know, these, I wouldn't even say extreme, these passionate views about things which are sometimes not what you agree with that you can't find somebody to have an equally passionate agreement. We have in the valley, we have a radio station, kind of a public access radio station, WMRW. And they had a controversy there because they did have, well, one talk show guy, he does programs on the TV station also but he has a regular radio show, he's very extreme. During the pandemic, he had a lot of really extreme, you know, self-proclaimed experts on everything on there but they also had a physician who had a regular program talking about health issues and things like that and they were actually adjacent to each other and they sort of got into a verbal battle in their different programs and the physician guy actually resigned and said, I'm not doing this anymore. I can't, you know, I can't be on here and have him attack me and his program, you know, constantly and I don't think he should be on the air because what he's saying and his guests are not actually factually correct and he's putting it out there. So it was quite a controversy and that's one of the things that raised the whole free speech thing with the TV station too because he's on, you know, our public access station at times with a show, with, you know, whatever expert popped up from, you know, reading for three hours on the internet and they're now an expert in whatever it is they read and, you know, quoting surveys, you know, I always joke, it's like, well, you know, I did a survey which means I asked four out of five neighbors and they all said this, you know, there's my research, you know. So, which is very frustrating to have that and, you know, and the radio station actually had kind of two points of view but it got so contentious that the one said, I can't do this anymore and he was actually the rational guy, so, but anyway, that's what happens. Yeah, that's actually, I mean, the program, the clip that we showed at the beginning of this panel was actually a counter-programming, an attempt at counter-programming that one of the folks who was a guest there has a monthly show at CCTV and brought in someone who was known as someone who was harassing and organizing against a marginalized group in our community and so we, you know, and that kind of sparked a conversation around, you know, it actually also made some of our staff members feel unsafe when this person invited an activist, sort of essentially an anti-trans activist into our center. And that made our staff feel unsafe and it brought up this conversation that we're having now, essentially. And, you know, that conversation between Sandy and Marina was quite contentious and I think it was helpful to see them, to see where they agree and disagree but also at the end of that conversation, Marina, you know, sort of, Marina was misgendered by Sandy a couple of times in the conversation and ultimately Marina said I'm not gonna come back here and have another one of these conversations, I don't feel safe here. And so I think that's a challenge that we're facing is that as we try to make the center or the channel and also the center available to different points of view, we're also losing the trust of community members that are doing anti-oppression work sometimes and I think that is where it becomes difficult for us to understand how we draw policy and also communicate to your point, Jessica, about why, you know, if a hateful programmer comes in and wants to make a show, we want to, you know, we have to let them make that show and what our commitment to doing our best to ensure that none of our resources are actually contributing to harm or the incitement of violence against our community while at the same time keeping those doors open is a challenge. Maybe there's not quite a question there but I think there's this third question here on the slides which is do you see your center as a place for difficult dialogue? What resources or guardrails allow these conversations to take place safely? And that's thinking about the safety of our community but also our staff members. And so I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Well, I certainly view the, you know, it's public access and I view it as a place where, you know, you can't have difficult dialogue and talk about things. We have difficult monologues though more because as I've said, we don't have the counterpoint a lot of times but it would be great to have the dialogue. And guardrails, I'd say I'd go back to our producer's handbook which is basically outlines, you know, what you can and can't do in programming. And as for safety and the, you know, like I said, there's one and a half of us and I don't go into the studio very much. So, you know, there's not, you know, Tony who runs the studio, it's like a piece, if he feels unhappy and unsafe, he just asks them to leave, you know, so it's that simple because it's just, you know, it's him in our studio room. So, you know, that's kind of it. So we don't really have that problem being a very small, small operation. Again, we're trying to create community. We're not really a television station. We're trying to create community and we do that by how we act and how we administer what we do as much as by what's on the channels. I think what's on the channels is actually sort of secondary. And so, again, we don't allow racist, sexist, homophobic, nationalist, whatever. We don't allow that behavior in the facility and we will suspend people if they do that. You know, we had somebody who was making transphobic remarks to the instructor and after the second occurrence, that person was just not allowed to take the class. You know, there are penalties for not behaving in our community by the community rules that we have. But we also make it clear that we protect the speech of people that we disagree with to the same degree that we protect people who we do agree with and that's an important part of establishing the kind of community that we want to live in. Yes, to that and I mean, I see that. The question is, do you see your access center? So again, to Tony's point, seeing it differently, like I think our channels can be a place or difficult dialogue. I also find difficult dialogue to be one of those phrases like, well, what does that actually mean? You know, how difficult does it have to be? But when it comes to dialogue between producers and staff or community members and staff, I mean, no, no, we're not a place for you to come in and bring abuse or hate and we have a very strong stance on that and often I'm the guardrail. But what I want to say though around that, so again, just separating like what you can say on the channels versus what you can actually bring into our community because we too are, we have a much larger community than what's actually on our channels. We have education programs, we have youth programs, we have a lot of community that operates outside of actually producing things for the channel and we want it to be a safe space. But what I want to say also about that is it just sort of, I was thinking about that and when you were speaking about what are the rules of engagement for producers and for other community members and when we do really pride ourselves on being a safe space for community, I think we also have to be careful about making assumptions about who's going to be difficult and let every community member engage in the access center part of it before we assume they're gonna be difficult because some of the people who have the most challenging productions are actually the nicest people to our staff. One example is we have a show, there's a man who's post-incarceration and he has a show called The Bounce Backs, an amazing show and he brings in people who he was in prison with and they have the most amazing conversations. He's brought in people who he was in prison with who are white nationalists and he's talked to them about that, why they did that while they were in prison. He's brought in people who've committed crazy heinous crimes. They have these really challenging and difficult conversations on the air and he and most of his guests are the people who are the most polite, most nice to our staff and our staff producers and have treated our space with so much respect. So I just wanna say that having that separation of who the people are when they're on the air in terms of how they might be challenging or what their background is, be careful not to assume that they're gonna be someone who might be challenging to deal with as a staff member or as an access center. You know, I was thinking, I wanted to add something about alternate channels too. So, you know, I'm sure most of the stations also are on YouTube or you use those other platforms and that's where you need to think about guardrails there and I was just thinking about the, we have a live cam of the covered bridge in Waitsfield and believe it or not that we get over two million views a year on that. It's hugely popular. I get, you know, I look at it at people in Japan and are watching the bridge. You know, we actually, one of our sponsors, we have a, you know, underwriters for it and I saw him the other day, he said, you know, somebody called me from California and I'm a realtor. I thought, well, I'll take the call because maybe they wanna buy property here and said, she said, I'm watching the cam and there are kids jumping off the bridge. You should call the police. And first we're like, okay, we don't have any police. So, you know, problem number one, but he was like, that's actually what they do. The kids go there and jump off the bridge. But I had to restart the stream for various reasons and I didn't find the button to turn off comments. And within four minutes, there were hateful comments there. I was like, oh my God, how quickly did people just devolve to, you know, hatred on, you know, pardon, on the bridge cam, on the bridge cam, it was inside of them to hatred, watching the bridge do nothing other than water running under it. You know, actually it was winter, so there were no kids jumping off it, thankfully. But it's just, so you know, we have, when we do something on there, we turn off comments, we don't let anybody, you know, have their own sort of access to comment on the bridge. And you know, actually I had it there too. Don't people stop at that stop sign at the bridge? Because actually the way the cameras angled, it looks, they stop before you actually see and they drive through the stop sign. So it does look like they don't stop, but I'm like, why is that? And I looked at the way the cameras angled and you don't actually see the car stop before they go forward. But anyway, and it's a one lane bridge, so you gotta stop, so. Anyway. I know it's really hard, but if we could move off of hate speech for just a second. Here's another kind of speech that we've had to talk about at the access centers. We had in our employee handbook that no staff people could have programs. And I understand that because you want your staff to work on other people's programs and so forth. But when I talked to the management, they were worried, because we're unionized, they were worried, well the union folks would get on the channels and then they'd be using it against us or something like that. And so we've gotten the rules changed somewhat. But this is another class of people that you have to consider a rule for. Can a staff person do a program on your channel? And if so, are they representing your organization and do you have rules about what they can say and can't say? So already we've entered into some area that has a level of constriction of free speech. I'm curious if either you, Jessica or Rob, have allowed staff. I have allowed staff. Jessica said that all of our staff have programs and they talk about it all the time. Yeah, Rob. Well, one of our board members is a prolific producer, although he's leaving the board because he's too busy on his other businesses. But he's been a very active producer and he's been on the board for years. So he's not a staff member, but he is on the board. I want to open it up for one more question from folks before we break out into some smaller groups. But does anyone have a question that they'd like to? Yeah. Could you possibly come up? No, no, no, actually we need you to be in the microphone thing. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Thank you so much for your distrall. So I like what you all said. Can I ask you all a question? With your particular locations and your demographics, where you are, does your board or the populist make a determination on who you either put late at night or talk about pulling off the air? The reason I'm asking is, you say Brooklyn or I don't know your demographics. I know Cambridge is 95% votes one way. I think that you're probably like 70 or actually Burlington is like 70, 30. So with those numbers, your board is going to have certain positionality biases. Does that play any effect on your roles? If that makes sense. Yeah. So we have a program policy committee on our board and they've actually not really done anything since I've been there in terms of overseeing programming. We had a meeting recently where it came up like, in the bylaws it says something like, making sure that the programs on the channels meet the needs of the Cambridge community. So it's pretty big. And so we had a bit of a discussion about what that actually means. Cause personally I don't think the board should be determining what goes on the channels. But I think there is a place for them to weigh in in terms of, if we look at the demographics of Cambridge, do we have the right mix of programming? For example, I've been trying to bring in more languages other than English into our programming. So we have a really big Haitian Creole population in Cambridge. We actually have a lot of immigrants from Somalia. So Amharic is a language that people speak. So I think that kind of board oversight of saying like, these are the demographics, we should be making sure that we increase the addressing these demographics of living in Cambridge. So in my time there, the board has not weighed in at all in terms of what types of programming is on the channels. I will say, so we bring in some programming that's not our own programming, democracy now. And that has been something that we've been doing for years, it predated me for sure. And I sometimes think we shouldn't do that. Right, yeah, for that reason. So yeah, so we should counter program it, right? So I mean, I think that that is something I've been sitting with in terms of bringing in the kind of other programming outside of our community. Does that really serve the needs of our community? The downside of it is that, oh my God, if that show goes on 10 minutes late, do we get phone calls? Oh my God, oh my God. People believe it's their right as a Cambridge resident to have free access to democracy now. So, but that's the kind of thing that I think we should really look at. Are we, in terms of the programming that we're bringing in, are we bringing in a similar counter programming from another network? I think that's a good question. We have democracy now too, and it's actually across our five channels, it's the most popular program that's on. But here's the thing. It's irrelevant what they talk about. It's not up to us, you know, if they, as long as they're not doing actionable speech, but we don't, we are not the sponsor of the program. You know, we tell democracy now, which by the way is in our neighborhood, we tell them you have to get a local community producer who's going to sign for that program and be responsible for the content. And it's not our program. With regard to other things, because it's not all just politics, you know, we ask our producers when they do the indemnification form to voluntarily mark if a program has adult content, you know, meaning whether it's sexual, or it's related to violence, or suicide in particular, or any of these kind of questions, we ask them to self-identify and to voluntarily take a time slot in safe harbor after 10 p.m. And if they're not interested in doing that, we negotiate with them. And it almost always works, but eventually if they show us programming that's not appropriate for the middle of the day, we'll pull the program or we'll suspend it, pending them taking a later time slot, but that's never related to a political point of view. You know, it has to be something that you can actually describe and measure, you know, in terms of the way humans are interacting or whatever. In general, no, the board plays no role in what goes on because we have the policies. The one case we had wasn't about really speech but commercialism, so one of our prolific board member, producer, has a few businesses he does and he created a show about a health oriented show about his deep breathing techniques, which is something that he promotes through a business he has. And he had the same name as his business as the show and we're like, okay, that's too close. And so we talked to the board and he's on the board and we talked about it. And he was fine, he said, well, I'll start the program for now and I'll think about bringing it back with a new name that's about more healthy things about deep breathing techniques and all this rather than, you know, the parallel namings. But that was the only time we've had the board involved and in a decision about content was where there was crossing the line on the commercialism of the show and the show was not commercial actually, it was just the name was the same. So it was kind of, we thought the promotion was just too close and he was fine with that. But we had the discussion, so. Great, okay, so now what time is it? It's about 11, 11.15. So for about 20 minutes or so, we're just gonna break out into groups of maybe four, five, three to five. If you wanna find a group of three to five folks around you and I think the idea is just to kind of chew on, we'll leave these questions up here. And you know, if you're, I have a feeling that folks have some burning thoughts about this conversation that they wanna unpack in a group of people maybe, but if not, maybe just revisiting some of these questions and seeing how each of your access centers are working on that. And then around 11.35, so 20 minutes from now we will reconvene and we'll just hear from a couple folks just what some observations or thoughts that came up in the room before we close out. So 20 minutes in breakout groups if you can kind of organize amongst yourselves. Once we're all kind of back together, awesome. Thank you guys. I'm just gonna ask if there was any, if anyone wants to share any observations or thoughts that came up in your conversations that around this issue that your access centers are thinking about or any policies that you're putting in place or thinking about putting in place related to free speech. Anyone have a thought that they'd like to kick it off with here? And we have to use the microphone, I know it's annoying, but if you could come up here and just share a thought. Sure. So we were in this group over here, the four of us, and we definitely talked about the counter-programming quite a bit. And I guess my concern that I brought was how direct can those responses be in terms of this specific person said a specific thing. So we talked about that quite a bit and we also talked about policies and then our own personal struggles with YouTube and comments and things that we've had to adjust in the past six months to a year or two because things have really been changing really rapidly and getting more and more hateful and hurtful, especially when we are all very ingrained in the internet as well, media, public access. We need the internet, we need these platforms. And I mentioned to how YouTube was actually kind of a benefit for us because we had a person interested in giving a program about basically anti-vaccination and YouTube deemed it misinformation. So it was not able to be hosted on YouTube. We had to tell him it needed to be hosted somewhere on our website and just recently I realized that they all got removed anyway from whatever random platform he found. So we found that there are workarounds and then I also wanted to call out Tony's wonderful comment about what I heard basically like not allowing exceptions. So there's no loophole. If you allow kissing, everyone has to kiss. If you don't allow kissing, then no one kisses. So not allowing those loopholes to appear is I think a really good comment. So that's what we talked about. Great. Any other thoughts, observations, bubbled up conversations in the room? I wish I could just bring the whole microphone back there but I can only get about this far. Thank you. We talked a lot about scenarios and things that had happened and to your story Jessica, we did have that producer who was so awesome on the channel and then would go on social media and I think just did it for fun to try to get people upset. Which of course now I've got the newspaper calling me, I've got people in the city calling me and I was like okay, we did create a statement that we put out there. Explaining the relationship between us and our producers and the thing is I did not wanna kick this guy off the air because he actually was getting guests on his show like our congresswoman, Governor Baker when he was first running for governor, so important people. So we had to keep that separate, we had to explain it. Once we did, a lot of the craziness died down. I think you just have to pick your message and stick with it. And we also had, Susan in her station had the YouTube situation where she had helped some of their producers get on their YouTube channel and they got kicked off for misinformation, just like there, so yeah, YouTube is definitely gonna help you maybe figure out what some of those standards are. And what was your, I feel like I forgot your story, Michael. You talked about too much stuff, actually. That's probably why I can't remember anything. Right, oh my God, my phone's ringing. Okay, so yes, so don't pull it off because you're just gonna call attention to it and give power to that. And that was our story. Awesome, thanks. Maybe one or two more, just share outs from the room. Maybe one more, or if not, we can also jump into conclusions, but going once, going twice. Okay, so I'll hand it over to each of you to just share some final thoughts, anything that you haven't mentioned that you wanna mention and just wrap us up here. So we'll start with you, Rob. Well first, thank you. This is really fun. Thank you, my fellow panelists. I learned a lot from the discussion from this side, so it's been great, and the comments and questions were great, so I think it's just been a great panel. And raising the directions and ideas and there's no hard answers, but I think it's the, you've gotta kinda go with the free speeches, free speech up to, maybe as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, shouting fire in a movie theater isn't exactly allowed, but everything else kinda goes. So the question always comes, are you inciting an action and when you're not? So that's kind of the line you have to figure out, but basically be fair and no exceptions and consistent. Yeah, so good luck to everyone. I just have to say, if you haven't noticed, this is a good topic for your channel. Like, doing a show about this is not only gives you an opportunity to bring these people into contact with each other in a controlled situation, but it also is a way for people to understand what you do. And my takeaway from the day if it had to be summed up is that everybody has to kiss. I wanna bring forward something that we've been trying to do just on the point of bringing forward more information about what is ours to do and where do we take a stand? What is our relationship to our producers? And also since there's a friend here from Boston Neighborhood Network, we've started a series on community media, and it's, so we've done two so far, but Glenn was on the first one. And so we've had panel discussions about what is community media? What is our role in the overarching community? I think this would be a good topic to take on as a group of community media centers regionally. So when I started working at Cambridge Community Television, I was like, why aren't we talking to each other? And I think what happened was, since our funding was this municipal stream, right? It was based on coming from our municipality. We all sort of dug in into our cities, but especially in the Boston area, we all share the same transportation system. We're cheek to jowl with each other. There are so many community media centers within a couple miles of each other. So I'm trying to encourage us all to do more together. And now, with most of our content, not even being watched on the cable channel that only exists in our city, but being watched on our website or watched online, these lines around, I'm not gonna quote Glenn because I always slip into imitating him, which you'll know is a funny thing, but with his Boston accent. But Glenn was talking about, they wanna do something in Alston, Boston Neighborhood Network, and they were kind of afraid, are we getting too close to Cambridge? And we should be doing more stuff together. And we should be addressing these issues of educating our community, our wider community about what our purpose is together. So I was thinking this might be a good topic for our last community media panel that we hosted. We focused on revenue and space because for those of you who don't know, Somerville Community Media was kicked out of their space and they had a week to move out after 35 years. And so that's what we talked about, but maybe we can do a community media panel of the Boston area around this topic and talking about how we can work together to be consistent and also to educate not only the community, but even like other local press about what is our relationship to our producers and why are these producers on the air and what does it mean to be a community media producer? And yeah, so I think just working together more is always a good idea. Like I always love coming to these conferences because I love learning from my fellow community media people and I think we've isolated ourselves sometimes too much because of this funding structure and I think we can start breaking out of that a little bit more. Awesome, thank you Jessica, Tony and Rob. Thank you so much. Thank you all for jumping in today. Appreciate it.