Mike Wassenaar is the Executive Director of the St. Paul Neighborhood Network. This audio clip is a Media Minutes Extra from his interview for the Sept. 18, 2009 program.

"An artist asks: Do I have skin in the game on a bill that doesn’t necessarily have the word “arts” in it? Why should I care about cable regulation? Why should I care about open access on the Internet? Why should I care about the support of diversity of media outlets? But I think there are enough people who work in the media arts now who think about a media environment where you need to have diversity of voices, diversity of outlets so artists can actually express themselves with audiences. If there’s only one platform or one theater that’s controlled by one group of people or one corporation, it’s very, very hard to get access to an audience. I think artists understand that. So when we look at diversity of broadcast ownership, the diversity of noncommercial outlets, they begin to understand, well, you need to have multiple distributors to be able to get to audiences. If you don’t have that, it hurts your ability to actually reach people. So I think there’s a place for common cause there."