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WASTELAND TELEVISION

It's Open Season on TV

In the late 1980s, Jon Kinyon started making short sketch comedy videos which he put on VHS to hand out to friends and show at parties – a pre-internet viral video campaign. Later on, he compiled the skits and launched a cable access TV show – which quickly got him banned from cable access TV in his hometown.

Palo Alto Cable Channel 6, a Public Access station in Jon's hometown of Palo Alto, CA, aired the first episode with a disclaimer at the beginning. Other shows featuring nudity, gore, and profanity aired regularly on the channel with no such scrutiny.

With two more 30 minute shows readied for broadcast, Jon arrived to submit them to the Program Director of the station who told him, “We’ll wait to see how these are received by the public before we accept any more.” Jon was dumbfounded. The Public Access station was created as a condition of the cable company’s contract with the City of Palo Alto. Public Access stations are required to air any program produced by a local citizen. They don’t have the right to censor content or decide who gets on the air.

6 months went by and his shows were never aired. He kept being told that they couldn’t find room on the schedule. Jon pointed out that they’d been rerunning programs to fill empty time slots on the channel. They clammed up.

Jon's show wasn’t advocating anything illegal or obscene – even if his show were something as repugnant as KKK telethons they’d have to air them according to their own policies and legal obligations. Other Public Access stations in Mountain View and Cupertino aired his programs with no such problems. Jon's complaints in person and in writing to the station did not remedy the situation. He had to conclude that he was singled out and censored because someone at Cable Co-Op didn’t like his sense of humor.

One sketch, “The Poor Rich” poked fun at rich folks and another one, “Honest Dave’s Used Car Ministry” took on religion. But Jon thinks what sent the station programmers over the edge was either the skit that brutally mocked white supremacists called “The Great Debate” or the segments of “Bon Bon the Voodoo Clown’s House of Voodoo” where an evil clown hosts a TV show that teaches kids black magic.

contact: jon@kinyon.org