"It was basically an hour of still photos of women like you might see in a porno magazine," says Charmagne Boardman of what she saw while channel flipping after the late news earlier this month. That wasn't half as shocking as when she realized she had landed on Time Warner's public access channel, which also runs Akron Public Schools programming. And it galvanized her into putting burrs under the saddles of the local school district and the Akron City Council.
``Some of (the pictures) were fully nude and some were partially nude in what I would call provocative positions," she tells the Akron Beacon-Journal.'' The segment was the "Booty Call" segment of a show called Anything Goes; the show's co-producer, Anthony R. Hudson, says it was a constitutional free speech and expression exercise.
But Time Warner Cable says they might suspend the show's producers for soliciting money on the show, because public access means non-commercial. Company officials also say they can't do much about the show's material other than making sure it runs during hours children are least likely to watch television.
Akron Public Schools uses the bulk of the channel's airtime, the Beacon says, with 110 hours of school news programming over six days each week. "We have gotten all of three phone calls on this, and as soon as we received them we called Time Warner and expressed our concerns and unhappiness over it,'' district spokeswoman Karen Ingraham tells the paper.
Anything Goes also has some members of the City Council pondering whether public access itself should go.
``How can we set up some kind of community norms, but still legal?'' says Councilman-at-Large Michael Williams to the Beacon. ``Obviously, the majority of the producers on public access put on programming that people in Akron would not find objectionable. Even the bikini stuff and all that, I'm like, OK, it's not what I prefer my kids watching, but I'm not going to get worked up about it. But the nudity, that's something else.''
Hudson isn't exactly an obscure figure in Akron. He once ran for the City Council seat Williams holds, and he once sued council president Marco Sommerville over an incident at the city's African-American Festival, the Beacon says. Sommerville says he doesn't want to eliminate public access entirely, but the city needs to discuss the proper times for airing certain programs on the channel.
Hudson says any outrage over Anything Goes is off base. "(The Jenny Jones Show) is on at 3 p.m., right when children get out of school," he tells the Beacon. "Last week, Jenny had a big booty contest and a big breast contest. We don't show violence. We don't show full nudity. And our program is at 12 midnight.''
