• Functions as the main television outlet for IndyMedia, the media organization of the far left
• Has acknowledged developing programs with "partners" such as the Leninist group International ANSWER

Free Speech TV (FSTV) is a "progressive" commercial-free television channel available via public access channel 9415 on the DISH Satellite Network. Some of its programs also appear on 108 local community access cable systems in 28 states. It works closely with, and serves as the main television outlet for, the Independent Media Centers (IndyMedia).

FSTV and its sister entity Free Speech Internet TV (FSITV) are owned and operated as "projects" by Public Communicators, Inc., a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in Boulder, Colorado.

FSTV was founded in 1995 by activist John Schwartz, co-creator with video artist Nancy Cain (wife of 60s radical Paul Krassner, publisher of the political satire magazine The Realist) and others of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)-syndicated television program The '90's.  Shot mostly using camcorders, this magazine show aired on approximately 100 PBS stations (1989-92). Schwartz inspired this program by having co-developed The '90s Channel, which bought access to feed independent leftist documentaries to eight cities via United Artists Cable (UAC).

After UAC was acquired by Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), the new owner demanded that Schwartz pay it nearly $250,000 per month for his ideological channel. Schwartz refused and left, but began distributing to whatever other cable system access channels would have him under the new name FSTV. In 1998 Democratic President Bill Clinton's administration began pressuring satellite direct-broadcast TV providers, the emerging competitors to local cable systems, to set aside four to seven percent of available channels for commercial-free public access for alternative voices. In January 2000 the DISH Satellite Network agreed to provide its public access channel 9415 for FSTV, thereby making FSTV available today to more than eight million American customers.

FSTV's programming is an admixture of radical politics and sex. In February 2005, e.g., the channel featured the newscasts of Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! and INN World Report. But FSTV also broadcast and rebroadcast Read My Lips: The Vagina Show; Laying Rubber: The Condom Show; and My Messy Bedroom, a Canadian series "about sex and relationships amongst three girls and their ever-expanding circle of drop-by friends" and their lives of casual sex and masturbation. "What Democracy Looks Like" is FSTV's slogan.

In 2002 FSTV had "a full-time staff of roughly 20 people and an annual budget of $1.8 million," Bertucci told the local Boulder Weekly. The non-commercial FSTV's money comes from viewer donations and foundation grants. Cash has poured in from such sources as the Gill Foundation's $20,000 grant for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender national program/distribution," and in amounts as large as $65,000 in a single year from the William H. Donner Foundation. In 2001 FSTV's co-founder and Program Director Jon Stout was awarded a two-year Next Generation Leadership Program Fellowship to enhance democracy by the Rockefeller Foundation. At least $35,000 has been given to FSTV and another $25,000 to its parent Public Communicators, Inc. in recent years by the Glaser Progress Foundation.

FSTV's Advisory Board includes author Barbara Ehrenreich, former Vice President of Democratic Socialists of America; author Tariq Ali, a frequent contributor to Z Magazine and a radical Marxist who has aligned himself publicly with Islamist extremists; Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR); record producer Danny Goldberg; radio talk host Jim Hightower; Don Rojas, General Manager of Pacifica Radio's New York City station WBAI; and Dee Dee Halleck, who founded Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV, the latter of which inspired Schwartz to create FSTV.

FSTV earns no advertising dollars (although one of its corporate entities was apparently legally structured as a potential for-profit company, and FSTV's website markets books, videos and other products that generate revenues). But the station's financial needs are modest, because so much of what it broadcasts it gets at little or no cost. FSTV encourages young filmmakers to send in (and requires them to sign away part of their rights to) documentary and news footage they produce. FSTV pays these filmmakers at most a token $50 to cover a fraction of their expenses. FSTV recruits aspiring filmmakers both through its website and IndyMedia with promises that their work might be seen and credited worldwide.

FSTV has become adept at making worldwide connections, especially in nations that share its anti-American views. Thanks in part to money from the Glaser Progress Foundation, FSTV has mobile cameras and satellite uplinks for what it calls its "Mobile-Eyes" coverage. In 2002 and 2003, for example, it gave live coverage to anti-war demonstrations and its images were widely aired in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Since 2000, FSTV, which used to limit itself to broadcasting other people's documentaries, has been producing more and more of its own programs. It usually does this with activist groups working with FSTV as "partners." In 2003 then-spokesperson Linda Mamoun wrote that for recent anti-war demonstrations and programs, FSTV's "partners included the American Friends Service Committee, International ANSWER, National Network to End the War in Iraq…the Not in Our Name Project….the Institute for Policy Studies, United for Peace & Justice, Global Exchange, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and other groups opposing military intervention." FSTV has also, on occasion, partnered with Human Rights Watch.

FSTV's programming projects a negative image not only of the United States but also of Israel. "Can there be peace and justice in the Middle East if Israel exists as a Jewish State?" FSTV asks rhetorically. Its reports describe Palestine as a "prison" under Israeli "occupation." The prime reporter FSTV uses is British journalist Robert Fisk, a hostile critic of Israel. Among FSTV's report banners are the following: "Deaths of schoolchildren expose Israeli brutality"; "Zionist settlements expanding in West Bank and Gaza"; "United Nations report: Israeli forces have inflicted a 'reign of terror'"; and "Questioning the Legitimacy of the Israeli State."