[Peace] REMINDER: UPTV meeting is noon TODAY

[Randall Cotton]

Please consider attending if you haven't already decided to. The need for
public witnesses is stronger than ever, since the city administration
continues to pressure and interfere with the UPTV Commission as recently as
last Friday (when the City Attorney, Steve Holz, pressured the commission to
drop an agenda item mentioning "Democracy Now!"). Also, note that now we
know for certain that the Martel Miller censorship issue will definitely
come up during the meeting business.

THE MEETING IS NOON TODAY, URBANA CITY COUNCIL CHAMBERS (400 S.Vine St.,
Urbana)
(the largest room on the ground floor) Parking available at Lincoln Square
Mall (across the street).

Here is the latest press advisory I sent out early this morning:

PRESS ADVISORY (UPDATED)

Public to oppose censorship by Mayor Satterthwaite and the City of Urbana at
Monday's Urbana Public Television (UPTV) Commission Meeting

On Monday, September 13th at noon in the Urbana City Council Chambers,
dozens of local citizens will demonstrate opposition against Urbana City
Administration attempts to censor public-access cable programming requested
by over 1200 local residents. "Democracy Now!", an increasingly popular
publicly-funded, non-profit, independent news and analysis program has been
requested for scheduling on public-access cable channel UPTV (Insight
Communications cable channel 6) by a petition of over 1200 area residents.
However, the request was blocked by Mayor Todd Satterthwaite at the last
UPTV Commission meeting on July 12th. The mayor, who normally doesn't attend
UPTV Commission meetings, was present at the July 12th meeting to argue
vigorously in opposition to the initiative. Late last week, Urbana City
Attorney Steve Holz continued obstruction attempts by pressuring the Chair
of the UPTV Commission to remove the meeting agenda item dealing with this
issue. A comprehensive history of this issue (complete with transcripts and
audio clips of the July 12th meeting) is available on the web at:

http://www.ucimc.org/feature/display/20138/index.php

In addition, at the same meeting, UPTV staff will report on the issue of the
censored citizen documentary by Martell Miller about Champaign police
conduct, which was originally scheduled for public-access broadcast on
August 25th, but was banned by UPTV and turned over to police authorities. A
statement from Miller or his supporters is expected as well. Details on this
story are available on the web at:

http://www.ucimc.org/feature/display/20086/index.php

Press contact: Randall Cotton
217-351-8644 (home) / 217-722-8470 (cell)