Alternative Views

Alternative Views was a sixty minute public affairs program cablecast twice weekly on Austin Community Television, Austin, Texas, between 1978 and 1998.

Produced by Douglas Kellner, a University of Texas philosophy professor and Frank Morrow, the program grew out of a 1977 media study group designed to examine distortion and censorship in the media. As a result, Alternative Views sought to present issues ignored by conventional media. Topics addressed in the programs include: alternative energy sources, the CIA, civil liberties, international politics, labor unions, the effects of multinational corporations, poverty, pornography and violence towards women, racism, and U.S. foreign policy. Alternative Views also investigated local issues such as Austin politics, urban development and the University of Texas. International topics include interviews with former political prisoners from Chile, Iran, and Argentina, survivors of the Nagasaki bombing, and returned travelers from Cuba, Vietnam, El Salvador, Jamaica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iran, South Africa, and Central Africa. Notable guests to the program were: anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott; former U.S. attorney General Ramsey Clark; film director Edward Dmytryk; Jim Hightower; civil rights lawyer William Kunstler; biologist George Wald; and former U. S. Senator Ralph Yarborough.