by T. Scott
August 16, 2008
Over breakfast with several Colorado legislators last August, Bill Trevarthen was hit by an overpowering sense of deja vu. Attending the National Council of State Legislatures annual meeting in Boston, the lawmakers wanted to talk about Michigan’s experiences with Michigan Government Television. They were considering a similar setup in their state, and they had serious doubts.
“I was amazed. It was like a journey back into the past to hear their concerns — which were all the concerns that everyone had expressed here,” recalled Trevarthen, executive director of MGTV since it went on the air in July 1996 from its studios in the state executive office building across from the Capitol. “They wondered about legislators grandstanding to the cameras. They wondered about someone playing politics in deciding what went on the air. They wondered about footage being used in political commercials…”
As MGTV moves into its teenage years, it has long since allayed those types of fears. Trevarthen’s solid, nonpartisan administration of the network has kept it out of controversy and politicians’ gunsights. In fact, it has become part of the state government wallpaper to the point that its biggest criticisms are contradictory concerns: it’s not on enough hours and it’s, well, boring.
Trevarthen couldn’t agree more that the network needs to expand its 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., five-times-a-week telecasts. He’d love to see it go round the clock, like C-SPAN at the national level, but for starters he would be happy to expand into evening prime time. He’s working on that and expects a breakthrough within two years.
As for the suggestion MGTV is boring, Trevarthen takes issue. He mentions what he tells school groups: “If you think this has nothing to do with your life, just consider that legislators can decide how many hours you can be in a mall.” Besides, having watched thousands upon thousands of hours of MGTV feeds, Trevarthen is a junkie of his own network: “Some of this stuff is incredibly fascinating. Some of it is wild. The big issues like assisted suicide, for example, provide compelling testimony.”
He points to a growing list of “highlights,” including “compelling” moments such as last year’s continuous coverage of the budget crisis and temporary shutdown of state government, protracted coverage of the assisted suicide debate and the expulsion of Senator David Jaye, airing of the Detroit schools takeover, and individual events from President Bill Clinton’s address to the legislature in 1997 to Jennifer Granholm’s inauguration as Michigan’s first woman governor.
“Nobody’s going to sit down and watch all this the way you’d watch an episode of ‘Lost.’ But almost everyone at some point is going to care about some legislative committee or session or some Supreme Court oral argument, because it’s going to have a direct effect on them or someone they care about.”
“The other thing is,” he says, pausing for emphasis, “the point isn’t about how many people are watching, it’s that it’s open and on the air.”
Turning on the Lights
Lawmakers provided a warm public welcome to MGTV when it finally began gavel-to-gavel coverage of legislative sessions in October 1997. House and Senate leaders made a point of heralding the important contribution MGTV would make to bringing about an informed citizenry. But as is often the case, the leaders’ talk didn’t match their behind-the-scenes actions. While MGTV made its debut on July 15, 1996, it would be more than a year before lawmakers would finally agree to set aside their trepidations and become part of the show.MGTV’s roots can be traced back to at least 1993, when the cable industry’s Lansing organization, the Michigan Cable Telecommunications Association, commissioned a private study on the feasibility of creating a C-SPAN-like network in Michigan. Coverage of local government proceedings had become a regular part of local cable programming, but viewers could not see any part of state government in action, except in short news clips on commercial broadcast stations.
At about the same time, Governor John Engler was pushing to set up a network himself, including earmarking funds from a settlement between the Michigan Public Service Commission and Ameritech (now part of AT&T). He hired a Detroit-area firm to design and install the master control room in the Romney office building, as well as the control rooms and cameras in the House and Senate chambers, in the Supreme Court chambers and in the governor’s press room. Some $1.5 million was spent on the project. The cable group provided professional advice.
But recognizing that the best model was C-SPAN, not Engler TV, the cable interests offered to take over the operations of MGTV and put them under the control of a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation run by a board of directors comprised of cable executives. Independent of state government and financed by cable subscription fees, the corporation would not rely on support from the governor or lawmakers as it carried out its mission. It took a few months, but terms were worked out and the governor’s office handed over the project to the cable folks in December 1995.
“It never seemed to me that Gov. Engler had any intentions other than to get it going,” Trevarthen said, downplaying any notion that the often heavy-handed governor wanted his own network for political purposes. “His main concern was that he wanted these things on the air as a record of what was going on in Lansing.” But the cable association knew, he adds, “if you have it in a governor’s office, sooner or later somebody sometime is going to be tempted to use it as a propaganda machine.”
U.P. Network
Trevarthen, whose job in the hands of a more partisan director could have been one of the most powerful posts in Lansing, jokes that he got hired because nobody knew him. He wasn’t a political appointee of the governor or any Democrat, wasn’t a prominent lobbyist or other Capitol veteran. He was just a guy who grew up in the western Upper Peninsula, fell in love with radio broadcasting while in high school, graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in literature, went to work for a publishing company whose magazines included Michigan Roads and Construction, and got involved in broadcasting again through his volunteer work with the East Lansing Arts Commission.He learned about the new MGTV job during a networking lunch with Bill Rustem at Public Sector Consultants, whose Lansing firm had done the feasibility study for the cable association. Rustem advised him to contact John Liskey, an East Lansing-based cable executive whom Trevarthen knew from his Arts Council activities. He did, and Liskey told him they were about to start interviewing and had stopped taking applications. “The next day I get a message from Hugh Jencks [who was heading up the selection committee] saying, ‘if you can get us your resume by tomorrow we’ll work you in.’”
Being a relative unknown had its advantages, but also the downside that both political parties viewed him with suspicion, each assuming he was one of “theirs” since they knew he wasn’t one of “ours.” Many lawmakers were reluctant to let cameras in on their sessions, and this was one more reason to move slowly. As Secretary of the Senate Carol Viventi explained to him, “it’s going to take awhile for people to trust you, because they don’t know you.”
In the end, it was Trevarthen’s informal U.P. “network” that helped seal the deal. While the Republican-controlled Senate was becoming more receptive to turning on the cameras, the Democratic-controlled House was not. MGTV had been Engler’s child and, despite its new nonprofit status, was still housed near the governor’s office.
The House had set up an official subcommittee to study the issue, with House Democratic Floor Leader Pat Gagliardi serving as chair. Privately, a few lawmakers told Trevarthen the cameras would never be turned on. After reading a story in the paper about the fledgling network and reading Gagliardi’s cautious quotes, Trevarthen rang up the Democratic leader with a simple request: “Can we sit down and just talk?”
Their conversation turned more amiable after they discovered their shared Upper Peninsula heritage, Trevarthen from Ironwood and Gagliardi from Drummond Island far to the east. In fact, Trevarthen’s brother Larry’s best friend growing up was Don Koivisto, who became a state senator and was Gagliardi’s best man at his wedding.
“We had all these U.P. connections, so we began to have more contact. Eventually, Pat became a real believer and helped work it all out,” said Trevarthen. “It was ‘slow and steady wins the race.’”
Gagliardi, now a member of the Michigan Liquor Control Commission, jokes that Trevarthen’s U.P. background almost ruined the deal. “Ironwood — that’s practically Wisconsin,” he deadpanned.
But the former legislative leader says Trevarthen has done a good job and “has a very disarming style — you can’t help but like the guy. He comes at you with a big smile.”
Gagliardi says that at the time he was representing his colleagues’ concerns about looking on television like they weren’t paying attention during debates while they did the many other things they needed to do at their desks and in the chamber — “the legislative process does not always look pretty” — and their questions about how much control “the front office” would have. But “those have all been put to bed. Most people would like MGTV to expand, and there’s no reason it couldn’t become a great CSPAN-type station for Michigan.… I hope they can find the resources they need. They’ve certainly proven their muster.”
Cheesehead
Trevarthen’s office, with its stacks of papers, reports and videotapes, looks more like a journalist’s than a power broker’s. Prominent on his desk are bobbleheads of legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi and Hall of Fame-bound quarterback Brett Favre. A Lombardi Avenue street sign sits atop an adjoining table and his computer screensaver is emblazoned with “Go Pack Go.” True to his western U.P. roots, he is an unapologetic Cheesehead, happy to announce he shares four season tickets to the Packers with three friends, a trophy coveted by the waiting list of 40,000 fans seeking a similar prize.Trevarthen has a winning personality and a love of history and public policy as much as technology and broadcasting. He delights in talking about what MGTV has accomplished, especially in educational areas. The network has produced documentaries on the human story behind the Civil War flags enshrined in the Capitol, and the role of Michigan native and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy in a landmark case involving the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The highly produced and edited documentaries are an interesting departure from the MGTV norm. A big part of the network’s political success is its rigorous nonpartisanship and adherence to its fundamental policy of telecasting only gavel-to-gavel, unedited programming. The documentaries are available to schools, but have never been shown on MGTV.
“We follow the C-SPAN rule of no-editing-for-content religiously,” he explained. While that prevents MGTV from producing and telecasting slicker and more interesting fare, such as the State of Washington’s weekly wrap-up of legislative action, Trevarthen believes it is fundamental to MGTV’s mission. “It would violate that C-SPAN guideline, because you would be pulling out specific comments and there’s no way, no matter how hard you try, to be totally balanced as you pick out the most dramatic statements.” MGTV also regularly denies requests from, say, an association that wants to put a snippet on its own website of one of its members or staff testifying at a committee hearing.
MGTV also guards its copyrighted material jealously and has made it clear over the years that it won’t hesitate to take anyone to court for using any of its footage for political purposes. He says there have been only three suspected incidents his staff has looked into, but none turned out to be a highjacking. One of the big things in MGTV’s favor, he says, is the “gentleperson’s agreement” that has existed among lawmakers and their political henchmen not to try to use pieces of network footage for their own uses.
And Trevarthen is hardly apologetic for the tough policies: “that’s the best thing about a network like ours — it’s all there…we put it all on the record.” Although meetings of legislative committees and sessions, plus the Supreme Court, Board of Education and special events, hardly ever fit nicely into MGTV’s four hours of daily programming, network cameras capture all the activity for tape-delayed telecast — in complete form.
Michigan is one of only three states (Pennsylvania and California the others) to set up a state government network as a nonprofit under the control of the cable industry. Subscriber fees of 5 cents a subscriber per month, on par with what cable viewers pay for C-SPAN, provide MGTV’s approximately $1 million annual budget. Expenditures include roughly $450,000 for satellite uplinking to the participating cable systems around the state. The rest pays for a staff of five and one-half positions, only a half position larger than when it started 12 years ago, according to the executive director. Other states’ networks have budgets several times that amount and staff to match.
“The advantage of the C-SPAN model [for funding] is that you’re not dependent on state financing when the state goes through serious financial times,” he said. But the cable world has become highly competitive for subscriber fees since MGTV was set up, so Trevarthen is turning to foundations to fund expansion plans.
“We have a couple of grant proposals out now, and not just for extended hours. We have to make some changes to our website.…We have a nice website, but we want to do a lot more with it, including video streaming of the most important committees.” The network also wants to upgrade its extensive program archives at MSU — every minute of every telecast is stored on the East Lansing campus and available to the public.
Snackable
The pace of change in broadcasting and telecommunications is dramatic, of course, which means that 12 years from now, MGTV may look entirely different from today’s 12-year-old network. Will continued development of the web make television obsolete? Will erosion of intellectual property laws overturn the network’s policies against editing or making footage available to everyone? Will the digital generation’s demand for short bits of “snackable” information undercut current policies?“No one can predict what astonishing development will happen three years down the road and how that might change everything,” Trevarthen says. But for now, he knows that television has a power the Internet still doesn’t have, and that state government will still be operating much as it does now.
“I think people stop on the way through the channels when they see ‘Live.’ Live is a powerful thing on television.”
T. Scott is editor and publisher of Domemagazine.com.
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