Grumble - William Safire, My Boss and Everyone in New York City Needs to Grow the Hell Up

	or William Safire, My Boss and Everyone in New York City Needs to Grow the Hell Up
*-by Dr. Wombat*

For those of you who do not live in one of the cities served by Time Warner cable, let me begin with a simple apology.

Actually, make that two.

Firstly, this article discusses a corporate feud between Time Warner and ABC-Disney, and people's puerile reactions to it. If you don't subscribe to Time Warner cable, then you probably couldn't care less.

Secondly, I live in New York City. Most of the traditional nationwide media are centered here, so local and national coverage sometimes gets blurred for us. Therefore I must also apologize to those of you outside The City who are tired of people in the media assuming that Manhattan is the cultural center of the world and that everybody cares deeply about what happens here. I know you don't. I know that what New Yorkers see on their cable matters to you just about as much as what fabric Patagonians use for socks. I also know that Time Warner serves lots of other cities, and pulled ABC from all of them. But I live in New York, and I'm the one writing the article. Besides, I'm gonna try to make some fairly universal points here, so you might find it interesting. Who knows? More interesting than a 368-page dissertation on Patagonian footwear, anyway.

Just to bring everyone up to speed: ABC-Disney and Time Warner couldn't agree on ... well ... on a lot of things. Money, basically. And something called "retransmission consent," which sounds like it should have an obvious meaning, but probably doesn't. So Time Warner pulled the plug on the local ABC channel, right at the beginning of the May sweeps¹. ABC cried foul, and the FCC agreed, claiming that "no deletion of a local commercial television station shall occur during a sweeps period," and Time Warner put ABC back on its system. It was off the air for only a day and a half.

I don't know telecommunications law. I don't know whether the contract between ABC and Time Warner had expired, or whether Time Warner was just being petulant. And frankly, I don't care. No matter how silly these corporations are behaving, people in New York are being ten times more absurd:

My boss comes sailing into the office the next day² and, in the voice of a little kid who has just been told by her parents that they won't buy her a candy bar just because she wants one, cries "They took away my Regis!!!"

The evening news was full of "person on the street" testimonials all in the same vein. "I'm really going to miss my shows," "My mornings just aren't the same without The View," "I'm really upset -- I'll never know how Chastity got out of the well" and the like.

I don't mean to belittle their pain, but come on. Missing one or two TV shows doesn't really compare with police brutality, inept public schools, rioting or any of the other things that people have to deal with in the Big Apple. In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter that New Yorkers don't get to find out whether yet another white, slightly nerdy, slightly overweight man in his mid 30's can pick the capital of Uzbekistan out of a line-up?³

And God knows the world could do with a 36-hour break from Star Jones and Joy Behar⁴.

I was ready to put this whole episode and people's silly reactions to it in the ol' mental circular file, when something really disturbing happened:

William Safire, who tends not to ally himself with the "big corporations are evil" school of thought, wrote a column for the May 4^th New York Times about how upset he was that he didn't get to see the ABC news. That's not so bad in and of itself, and if the gist of the article had been that Mr. Safire has had a big schoolgirl-like crush on Peter Jennings ever since Tom Brokaw wouldn't take him to the prom, it could have made for some delightful reading.

Instead, it was one of those how-dare-they polemics full of blather about how the loss of ABC news to Time Warner subscribers was "a kick in the head to the public interest." After much fretting about "world communications dominance" and blaming Congress and regulatory agencies, he winds up by saying that Time Warner being able to blackout ABC news is "a danger to democracy."

I'm not kidding. These are direct quotes.

A danger to democracy?? World communism was a danger to democracy. Unchecked police power and taxation without representation are dangers to democracy. William Safire's missing one edition of Nightline doesn't quite make the grade.

As a public service to Grumble readers and watchers of television everywhere, I will now reveal to you how to hack through your cable providers' totalitarian attempts to blockade your local news:

Reach around the TV set and find the big cable plugged into the back.
Where the cable meets your TV you will find a little metal widget.
Turn this widget counter-clockwise a few times.
Pull the cable out of your TV.

Do you get this, everyone? All these shows that you think were taken away from you are in the air all around you; all you need is an antenna. Not coincidentally, a pretty darn good one has been built into your TV set.

On top of that, the cost of satellite TV is lowering every day. Sooner or later, probably sooner, it will cost no more than cable service. And as internet technology improves, we get closer and closer to the day when WebTV, Yahoo!, Mindspring, perhaps even Grumble will be able to send Port Charles and all your other favorite programs right to your screen upon request, 24/7. ABC could broadcast straight to the net the way they already broadcast straight to the atmosphere. Ain't no way Time Warner can take it away, even if they merged with AOL, AT&T, AAA and the ACLU.

The flow of information, be it meant to entertain or to enlighten, is becoming easier to access, more abundant, more chaotic -- in a word, more democratic -- every day. Without leaving my living room, I can get news from four major networks broadcast free, sixty cable channels, hundreds of satellite channels and millions of internet sources. I can get information from any major newspaper by walking downstairs and fishing it out of the shrub that the paperboy keeps hitting. And if it's mindless entertainment I want, add to all of the above sources the scores of local movie theatres, the four neighborhood video stores, three neighborhood bookstores, and more home video games than I know what to do with.

Even if Time Warner purchased each individual ABC affiliate and replaced all their programming with round-the-clock episodes of Saved By the Bell -- and can you imagine a greater threat to our way of life? -- we would still be swimming in news providers.

Besides which, Time Warner was a private company last time I checked. If they don't want to carry ABC on their system for any reason, from a contract dispute to distrusting any reporter named Cokie, then who the hell is anyone else -- me, William Safire, or especially my boss -- to tell them they have to? If William Safire wants to control what channels cable TV carries, let him build, maintain and operate his own multi-billion dollar system.

Until then, he can exercise his power of consumer choice just like the rest of us.

It's easy, and perhaps a little fun, to roll around on the floor and cry, cursing the gods in heaven, when something happens that we don't like. Especially when SuperSized companies are involved. But the grown-up way to solve problems is to stand up, look around and see if there's anything you can do about it. And guess what? There is.

1. The period during which TV viewership is tracked to determine advertising rates. Nielsen Media Research does this 365 days a year, but apparently they try harder in May.

2. Sad to say, Grumble commissions are not quite enough to support my extravagant, jet-setting lifestyle.

3. Tashkent.

4. Incidentally, the ABC homepage puts the link to The View under the category "ABC Soaps." Barbara Walters must be so proud.