Since 2011, there has been a network called First Nations’ Experience (FNX) and it has been made available to public television stations nationwide since 2014. When it went national, one of the PBS stations in Los Angeles, KLCS/58 (owned by the L.A. Unified School District) started carrying it on one of their subchannels. FNX is 100% programming about Native Americans and Indigenous Peoples and their programming was uniquely compelling.
In 2018, however, KLCS relinquished its transmitter and now shares the signal of another PBS station, KCET/28. (This was part of an FCC move to “repack” terrestrial broadcasting into a smaller range of spectrum, so that the upper UHF television band can be used for wireless telephone and broadband.) To merge their operations, both stations dropped one subchannel each. KLCS opted to drop FNX.
But at the beginning of this year, KCET began carrying the PBS Create channel, duplicating one of KLCS’ subchannels. This is unnecessary duplication, but KLCS refuses to reconsider their decision to drop FNX, and KCET doesn’t even answer e-mails asking them to consider it at all.
These two stations could easily drop one of the two Create subchannels and put FNX back on, but they apparently think what they are doing is “serving the public interest” so I have created a petition at Change.org in hopes we can let them know that diversity is a better “D-word” than duplication.
Please sign and promote: chng.it/...