"Progressive" satellite TV channel originally created to carry videos of the Paper Tiger TV Collective
Received funding from the Ford and MacArthur Foundations
Deep Dish TV describes itself as "the first national grassroots satellite network … linking local access producers and programmers, independent video makers, activists, and other individuals who support the idea and reality of a progressive television network. ... Our programs are shown on over 200 cable systems around the country, as well as selected public television stations … [and] used by teachers and community groups…."
Deep Dish TV was created in New York City in 1986 by Dee Dee Halleck, left activist and founder five years earlier of the local collective Paper Tiger Television, as a satellite channel to distribute Paper Tiger's and other radical videos.
Halleck's idea -- later imitated by Free Speech TV and other left activist broadcasters -- was simple: Cable television systems throughout the United States include "public access" channels among those fed into customer homes. These channels were intended to provide local programs ranging from city council meetings to showcases for local opinion and performances. But where cable companies produced nothing to broadcast during certain hours, Halleck recognized, this airtime could be filled with leftist programming via a free satellite channel.
"Once upon a time (in 1985), Paper Tiger TV was awarded a grant by the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, to transmit via satellite one live Paper Tiger TV show to public access stations all around the country," wrote Deep Dish TV co-founder Martha Wallner. Out of this came the "much larger idea" of a public access satellite network that would use grants such as the one from Massachusetts to distribute the work of radical videomakers nationally.
Deep Dish TV, whose name was inspired by viewer satellite dishes, was created from its outset to be, in Z Magazine's description, "a collective of progressive activists and videographers determined to utilize the emerging satellite technology" as a radicalizing, organizing, mobilizing tool. It is, according to its website, "funded by New York State Council on the Arts, the Maverick Film Fund, the Funding Exchange and hundreds of individual donors."
Between 1993 and 1998, Deep Dish TV received at least $190,000 in grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In early 2002 the Ford Foundationgave Deep Dish TV a grant of $75,000 "for the television news series Democracy Now!, to continue incorporating the aftermath of the September 11th attack into future broadcasts."
Democracy Now!, hosted by Pacifica radical Amy Goodman, has become the most prominent program broadcast by Deep Dish TV. This show began at, and retains close ties with, radical Pacifica Radio's New York City station WBAI.
"We also began to distribute programming for other organizations and producer groups for a fee or on a barter basis," wrote Wallner. "The Deep Dish Cooperative has distributed programs for such organizations as the United Farm Workers, the International Women's Day Video Festival, DIVA (the video activist component of ACT-UP), the Lannan Foundation, and Ramapo College's Latin American Video Archives."
Deep Dish TV distributes videos produced by Paper Tiger Television and by branches of Indymedia, a large share of whose activists and video makers are acolytes of Noam Chomsky. These linked entities share office space at 339 Lafayette Street in New York City. This building, owned by the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute, is home to many radical organizations and has been nicknamed the "Peace Pentagon."
