Paper Tiger TV
Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) is a non-profit video collective. Through the production and distribution of public and social video, community screenings, and grassroots advocacy, PTTV works to challenge and expose the corporate control of mainstream media. PTTV believes that increasing public awareness of the negative influence of mass media and involving people in the process of making media is mandatory for our long-term goal of information equity. (2022)
Contents
Paper Tiger Television was founded in 1981 as a volunteer-based video production and distribution collective. The collective has produced hundreds of half-hour programs on media, cultural, and political issues, which have been exhibited regularly on public access channels and in university classrooms, museums, and art spaces. The Paper Tiger series has been one of the foremost examples of the use of public access television to create and distribute guerrilla video and intellectual critique.
The series began when producer and media activist DeeDee Halleck invited communication scholar Herbert Schiller to host a series of shows on the ideology and economics of the New York Times. Using Schiller's presentations as a model, Halleck organized a fluid group of videomakers into a collective, and followed with critiques of other major media outlets such as Time magazine, CBS Evening News, and the New York Post, usually presented by a single host from the ranks of academia, media and political activism, or production, from Donna Haraway to Simon Watney to Jill Godmilow.
The analyses were informed heavily by left social theory, political economy, feminism, and multiculturalism, often focusing on the media institution's politics, its links to corporate America through advertising and shared ownership, and its ideological range of representations. The productions were determinedly amateurish and playful, with handwritten graphics, painted backdrops, and camera work showing the production process involved. The aim was to demystify television as a technology and institution, and to inspire viewers to become producers, presaging the 1990s camcorder revolution.
Most episodes were shot live in New York and were originally telecast on a weekly slot on Manhattan public access, the usual opening credit being “It's 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?” With a small paid staff to handle administration and distribution, the collective was mostly operated on a volunteer basis, stressing consensus decision making, shared roles in making shows, and the virtues of collaboration with a range of cultural critics and other media producers.
Throughout the 1980s, the focus of the series expanded to encompass broader media and cultural issues, highlight the achievements of alternative media projects, and address specific political controversies. In 1986, the collective initiated and produced Deep Dish Television, which was the first national series distributed through public access channels, and it helped to develop Deep Dish as an independent, ongoing entity. Collective members in San Francisco and San Diego started producing contributions to the Paper Tiger series, and the group organized retrospectives of its work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1985) and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1991), as well as contributing to many other installations and screening series.
In the 1990s, the increased use of camcorders led to more shows constructed in the editing room and the decline of live production. The exploration of political and social issues began to take precedence over critique of media outlets, although the collective remained involved in organizing for media reform and public access systems. Paper Tiger members helped to produce the Gulf Crisis TV Project (1990) in response to the first war in the Persian Gulf, which was distributed nationally on public access and public television channels, and internationally on Great Britain's Channel 4 and other systems. Paper Tiger TV producers also helped to organize the alternative media coverage of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, telecast as Showdown in Seattle on Free Speech TV. The collective also ran production workshops for schools and youth groups. (Source)
Literature[edit]
- Laura Stein, "Access Television and Grassroots Political Communication in the United States", in Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements, ed. J. D. H. Downing, Sage, 2001, pp 299-324.
- Daniel Marcus, "Paper Tiger Television", in Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, ed. John D.H. Downing, Sage, 2011.
