Almost lost in the Caruolo drama at recent Portsmouth Town Council meetings has been the ongoing effort by Tailgunner Gleason to get her pals on the PCC assigned to upgrade the sound system in the Council chambers. She's complained about audio at several meetings, repeatedly noted that the people in the PCC "have a lot of expertise to share," and urged action.

Last week, she almost went ballistic when town Admin Bob Driscoll came back with a proposal to hire an audio person to fix the sound -- because it included a quote for hiring a pro to tape the meetings. She most clearly did NOT want her PCC pals replaced behind the lens.

Bad enough that the Town got a new camera. Yes, it's an upgrade that will allow the town to burn an archive of DVDs to keep at Town Hall, but it forces Larry to transfer the contents to VHS for broadcast, which he got up to complain about.

Took me a while to unpack what was going on, but here's the nut, as I see it: To the PCC, Town Council meetings exist as a way to communicate directly with their base.

That's why Loudy & Co. make such a point of getting up at the lectern, even on issues where the Council's vote is already clear. And that is why the sound system is so important to them (when, in reality, the audio on Channel 18 isn't noticeably worse than Tiverton or Middletown.)

I'm all for transparency. I heartily support the upgrade of the sound system, but I think the Town Council should explicitly put the content of the meetings in the public domain, so that anybody could grab them off-air and digitize segments to YouTube, for, say, insertion into a blog. We don't all have the time to listen to the whole meeting just to get the important parts.

From a media theory perspective, it speaks volumes that the PCC prefers the one-directional, broadcast model of television and print newsletters, while the progressive folks in town have web sites, e-mail lists, and blogs. As Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message."