Dishing up Christianity

In 1992 Congress passed a law designed to increase the diversity of television programming and to amplify traditionally underrepresented voices. The law required satellite TV services to reserve at least 4 percent of their programming capacity for noncommercial, educational channels. They would pay a relatively small fee to be included in the satellite services' basic programming packages. Today, many of the public-service channels the satellite services are carrying to meet that quota are run by well-financed Christian organizations, while alternative, non-Christian viewpoints remain scarce. On DirecTV, the nation's largest direct-broadcast satellite service, six of the twelve public-service channels are Christian. A seventh, run by the Mormon Church's Brigham Young University, airs religious programs several times a day. The Dish Network, the other main satellite TV provider, carries many of the same Christian channels, although fewer count toward its public-service requirement. The two satellite networks fill the rest of their quotas with the likes of C-SPAN, teacher-training channels and university stations.

Critics say diverse public-interest programming never became a reality in large part because Congress left the law's details up to the Federal Communications Commission. When the agency got around to implementing the law in 1998, regulators acknowledged the diversity goal but rejected calls to actually require any diversity among the public-service channels, instead giving the satellite services full discretion over which channels to carry. "We've reaped the unfortunate reward of the FCC [rules]," says Cheryl Leanza, deputy director of the Media Access Project, which had lobbied regulators to create an independent panel to select programming that would satisfy the public-service obligations. "The FCC has basically washed its hands of enforcing the set-aside."

The ubiquity of Christian programming--and the lack of independent perspectives--infuriates John Schwartz. He runs Free Speech TV, a channel that aims "to advance progressive social change" through antiwar programming and international documentaries. The Dish Network counts Free Speech TV toward its public-service quota and beams the channel into approximately 8 million homes. But DirecTV, with nearly 11 million subscribers, has repeatedly rejected Free Speech TV's applications to be carried. "This whole right-wing religious thing, I think, is a pretty sorry way to implement" the law, Schwartz says. Free Speech TV is the only unabashedly liberal channel available on satellite television. The next closest thing is WorldLink TV, which is carried on DirecTV and the Dish Network and features programs that often have a liberal tilt. Still, WorldLink's mission is to expose Americans to global viewpoints, not to embrace a progressive agenda.

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