CAT TV: OUR VOICE TODAY; OUR HISTORY TOMORROW
by Zan Jarvis

A voice for everyone who wants personal expression -- that's the goal of community television. Artists, musicians, actors, writers, the opinionated, the educators, the funny, the strange and the wise all have a place to express themselves here in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Community Access Television opens its electronic arms to everyone.

This is not your mother's television. Whatever anyone can imagine to shoot, short of the overtly pornographic, gets on the air. Granted, these shows might never test well according to the network standards. The odd and the quirky expressions of opinion have a platform, regardless of whether most people like them. The strangest, most cutting-edge music gets full play. The fledgling playwright can try out as many scenes as there are actors willing to assume a role. The documentarian can share the truth of any aspect of our time and place.

The goal never waivers. Keep the airwaves open for the people to express whatever suits their fancy -- serious or satiric, frenetic or faith-based, instructional or just for the fun of it. The people who work for CAT serve as faciliators. They teach video literacy and help folks go in whatever direction their show dictates.

Behind the scenes, the CAT people must patch together enough public and private funding to afford operation costs, including constant equipment upgrades, keeping up with FCC mandates and covering the costs of transmission. In such a free for all, someone usually gets their feathers ruffled enough to take action. Budgets must cover occasional legal fees. Someone on staff must survey current legislation and give lawmakers input to protect the rights of the people to express themselves in this manner. Effort also goes into monitoring proposed changes in regulations and offering feedback to the agencies involved. All this takes time and costs money. The old saying applies that freedom of expression is never free.

Director Sky Blaylock, her board and her staff must be on the lookout for grants and large donations from new sources. They must defend the portion of the city budget that is allocated to CAT and make sure they meet all requirements to keep getting those funds.
Television never gets cheaper, even when public coffers grow empty. Like the family hampster, CAT staff often must run as hard as they can just to stay in one place.

Even if you have the complete cable package, no other station can match the variety of CAT-TV. You may see two guys seriously discussing international relations while every color and pattern possible plays across the picture and the camera pans down to a quarter lost on the concrete floor. Next time you tune in, an incredibly limber woman will show you how to move into yoga positions so that you can actually do it. You could learn how to cook on CAT-TV. Or you could use CAT to keep up with the city council and other municipal meetings.

Our identity lives in the constant video documentation of every aspect of our lives here. The footage city employee Frew Gallagher shoots catches us right in the middle of every public thing we do from marketing and politicking to parading and dancing. We hardly notice her camera anymore. She records our history every day and we can see it played back on CAT TV.

Each of these programs is a window looking into our hometown. Together, they show our particular place in time in a way it is being recorded nowhere else. For those who come after us, these personal snippets will show the true character of our community in this time. They will be the documents that define us just as letters sent by soldiers from long-ago battlefields or missives posted back East from relatives lost to the new world of the West, illumine their times for us now.

How valuable is all that? It's invaluable. No price can be attached to freedom of expression, yet we would be impoverished without it. Those who come after us would be robbed of all that we are here in this specific little town in this particular time. Most importantly, without CAT, our ability to reach out to those nearest to us, to affect the sensibilities of our neighbors, to take the time to say who we are and what we think would be compromised. Even if you never make a program at CAT or even watch it, you as a Fayetteville resident would be diminished should it ever go. CAT holds out the invitation for us to say what we think and show what we feel. Nothing is more American than that.