Willy Gorongfel, the Yapese news reporter, announces on television: "This is WAAB-TV going on air, broadcasting eight hours a day, with news on Tuesdays and Fridays, when it's nine hours. So get our your betel-nut, relax in front of your television, and enjoy yourselves!" The small island of Yap was a part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Island -- known as Micronesia -- a possession given to the United States as a "strategic trust" by the United Nations following World War II. For the people of Yap, the US. has been a source of government jobs and benefits. But critics charge that those benefits have created an island welfare-state whose people are so inundated with free handouts that they are abandoning their culture and turning to American values and institutions. Village life-- fishing in the lagoon and gardening in the taro patches -- is being replaced with canned foods, beer, and shanty towns. Little has been done for the islanders except what was in the United States's strategic self-interest. In 1979, during the negotiations leading to the "Compact of Free Association" with the U.S., the people of Yap learned that they were to be given a television station and a steady supply of American programs. This came complete with commercials for Big Macs, Buicks, deodorants and carpet shampoo. All this was provided free by the mysterious "Pacific Taping Company" of Los Angeles. The six thousand residents of Yap were also supplied with a small television studio and amateur video equipment, with which they were to produce local news reports. Many Yapese were opposed to television. They saw it as a threat to their fragile culture and as an outsider's attempt to foist changes on them. Some believe that the "Pacific Taping Company" was a front for a conspiracy designed to create dependency and promote U.S. cultural values in an otherwise insignificant, but strategically imporant, island.