Pleas in Many Tongues Restore TV Station to Ventura Cable Service

Immigrant residents of the Conejo Valley and the Las Virgenes area, who raised a multilingual storm of protest over the elimination of a foreign-language television station from a local cable system, will finally be able to catch up on their favorite soap operas in Japanese, Armenian and Farsi.

Ventura County Cablevision returned KSCI-TV to its cable broadcast lineup today. Earlier this year, many members of the area’s ethnic communities had staged a protest at City Hall and launched a petition drive to have the station restored.

“All of the various ethnic groups, some of which are not necessarily at peace in their homeland, cooperated to get us back,” said Eileen Salmas, cable relations director for the San Bernardino-based station, which broadcasts news and entertainment programs in 16 languages.

Ventura Cablevision--which serves Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village, Agoura, Moorpark and parts of Camarillo-- dropped KSCI on May 1 to make room on its 31-channel system for other stations.

But the decision sparked an outcry among bilingual cable subscribers, who said the station’s programs--in languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Farsi, Russian and Vietnamese--provided their families with one of the few cultural links to their homelands.

Cablevision president Michael Kemph, after meeting with community leaders, agreed in June to return the station to the cable system Aug. 1. He said a survey conducted last year by the system’s previous owner, Storer Cable, had shown that only 1% of the area’s 57,000 cable subscribers watched the foreign-language station.

More Viewers

Kemph, who cited the survey as the reason KSCI was dropped, said he agreed with members of the area’s ethnic communities that the station was watched by a much larger number of local viewers than had been reported.

Viewers of KSCI tuned in to a wide range of foreign-language programs, including ethnic cooking classes, overseas news broadcasts, foreign films and variety shows. Some of the most popular programs are the foreign-language serials that capture the attention of KSCI viewers in the same way prime-time shows such as “Dallas” have captivated English-speaking audiences, station officials said.

More than 1.5 million viewers watch the 24-hour-a-day station in six counties from Ventura to the Mexican border, station officials said.