Protect Community Media From Cable Lies

We need your help right now for community media. 

Cable industry lobbyists have swamped the state capital with lies and distortions to stop much-needed changes in the discriminatory treatment of public content on cable.

They want to keep on degrading the signals of public community benefit TV channels to outdated technology that makes Zoom captions illegible and compresses images so they are indecipherable. By down-converting a high definition signal to a standard definition signal, up to 80% of the picture information is discarded. This is ridiculous in 2022 and will get a lot more ridiculous as time goes by. 

Industry has somehow convinced the state Assembly that providing functional and robust community benefits on cable systems will break the bank, although 20 other states already have high definition public channels, including the cities of Denver, Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Portland and Seattle. Californians already pay some of the highest average cable bills in the country. 

We only have two weeks to set the record straight and combat the lies or this modest reform dies. 

Send this myth and facts email to the 37 Assembly Democrats who bought the cable lies hook, line and sinker, and shamefully abstained.

TAKE ACTION HERE

They handed a big victory to cable industry lobbyists over community media, but we can make it a temporary victory with a second vote by the end of May. 

Help us protect vulnerable Californians who are hearing-impaired, immobile, or otherwise dependent on their televisions for public content, including safety and emergency information, and ensure that public interest content doesn’t get second class treatment – forever. 

Let’s use people power to break through the lies.