May the better demagogue win

June 9, 2006

The debate among conservatives over “[tag]a la carte[/tag]” [tag]cable[/tag] — in which consumers pay only for cable [tag]TV[/tag] [tag]channels[/tag] they want — got a little more interesting this week when the James Dobson weighed in, on the opposite side of Pat [tag]Robertson[/tag] and Jerry [tag]Falwell[/tag].

Advocates for cable choice have picked up a big endorsement: Dr. James [tag]Dobson[/tag], the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family Action. […]

Daniel Weiss, senior media and sexuality analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said even if a family blocks objectionable channels, it still winds giving money to the company’s behind them.

“You’re not only losing money out of your own wallet,” he said, “you’re actually subsidizing and helping to fund the very program you find reprehensible. That’s simply not an option.”

Except to many of Dobson’s closest allies, it has to be an option.

The FCC says that the average household watches only 17 channels — and apparently, evangelical right-wingers aren’t pulling in many viewers. As far as Robertson, Falwell, Benny Hinn, and a few others are concerned, if consumers pick which cable channels to receive, they probably won’t sign up for Christian Broadcasting Network and Trinity Broadcasting Network. For TV preachers, fewer households means fewer viewers, and fewer viewers means less power, influence, and cash.

It’s set up quite a fight among the theocons. Focus on the Family and the Parents Television Council want a-la-carte cable so families won’t have to pay for channels they find offensive. CBN and Falwell ministries are in a panic over a-la-carte cable because, without it, they’re effectively going to be run off the air.

Colby May, a lawyer for Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, noted that religious broadcasters believe the measure “will cause a significant dent in their ability to fill the great commission: to go into all the world and share the news that Jesus is Lord.”

Who’ll win? Stay tuned.

It’s so wonderful to live in a country where we might someday be able to choose to not give money to pornographers and televangelists.

This just can’t come too soon.

  • If I can cancel FOX News and CBN and lower my monthly contribution to Time Warner I think the winner is clearly me.

  • Money will win, of course. My guess is Dobson is saying this to appease his base, but wouldn’t have said it if there was any chance it would have reduced the influence of the TV preachers. Sort of like those senators who only took a stance against Bush’s court nominees once they were sure there was no chance they’d actually be rejected.

  • While I am a tad torqued on being on the same side as Dobson (this one and only time) I must say I find this all highly amusing.

  • Seriously- “Media and Sexuality Analyst”?! I bet Daniel Weiss is a load of fun at parties. I bet he probably watched the wardrobe malfunction zoomed in tight on a big screen about 4000 times to document just how many square millimeters of offensive nipple were visible.

  • It is amusing…You would think the televangelists would have faith in their viewers. But if the viewers could choose where would they put their money…televangelists or a sitcom?

    Since I don’t have cable and gave up my satellite, I really don’t care at all. Televison is, to paraphrase Marx, the current opiate of the masses.

  • I used to receive emails from one of these Christian groups. The emails encouraged me to participate in a variety of boycotts and petitions about moral issues.

    One day I received an email that encouraged me to buy DVDs from a certain company that took R rated movies and edited them for family viewing. The message in this email was that I should keep Hollywood’s lavscivious trash out of my home and fight Hollywood’s trash by purchasing from this editing company. I wrote back to the organization and mentioned that purchasing from the editing company would only drive sales of the very DVDs that the organization finds offensive since the editing company legally had to buy a copy of each DVD to be edited. Isn’t that ironic? Needless to say I got no response from the organization, and I took myself off their email distribution.

  • Daniel Weiss, senior media and sexuality analyst
    James Dobson: Dan what do you think about those two?
    Daniel Weiss: Excuse me sir. Do you mean the two sitting by the door?
    James Dobson: Yea! The one with the baggie jeans, sweatshirt and work boots sitting next to that real feminine one.
    Daniel Weiss: Sir, in my professional opinion, I’d say they are most certainly a couple of dykes. You see sir, the feminine one is what we in the business call a lipstick lesbian. Sir, Sir! Why do you have that far away look on your face?

  • Don’t write off televangelists so quickly. This isn’t the old days when there was news, discussion, sitcoms, revues, westerns, mysteries, public service, sports, religion, etc. in all three major networks’ programming (and the “fairness doctrine” hadn’t been dumped). When, for example, news was David Brinkley and religion was Bishop Fulton Sheen.

    Now that the entire medium (network and channel) has become simply “entertainment” — the circuses of old Rome — we need some equivalent of the circus sideshow. Televangelists fit that bill nicely.

  • A Republican ideal we always hear about is their insistance that consumer choice should drive all markets. Let’s see if they’re really honest about that. If this passes, it’ll be just about the only bill this year that I will have supported.

  • Hey, I want to be a “Sexuality Analyst”, too! The pay’s probably not that great but the fringe benefits would be awesome! What do I have to do, audition or what? 😉

  • The people who wouldn’t sign up for certain channels don’t watch those channels now. So the channels would not lose any viewers.

  • I agree with Ed. The fact is, you don’t really know what to think about something until you’ve experienced it. Wasn’t the benefit of Ann Coulter going on NBC that she was exposed as a trite, evil skeleton of misery in front of people who would never watch Fox “News”? That’s good. And when people who do watch Fox “News” cancel all the other news stations, they will never have the chance to see another perspective.

    When we fund things that don’t have a present and immediate interest to us (or that don’t benefit us directly), we enlarge the realm of possibility. Sure, that means that televangelists and pornographers and their ilk (because all too often, they are of the same type, just selling different lies), but it also provides for PBS and NPR. The same conservative attack on public broadcasting (“we don’t want to subsidize what we don’t want/use”) works here (as well as for public transportation, public schools, international aid, etc. etc. etc.), and that should be unsettling.

  • P.S. (and then I’m off the soapbox)

    Does anyone here watch Comedy Central? Cartoon Network (late night)? Bravo? IFC? “Insert Cool Station You Watch Here”?

    Would you have “opted-in” to a network like that, based on the way it might have been marketed at its inception (i.e., pre Daily Show, pre Adult Swim, pre whatever that show is where the gay guys come in and re-make the straight guy and in the process show America that gay guys are fun and non-threatening)? Of course not. And TV would suck, simply putting on what already sells, since competition would be non-existent.

  • Not to get all serious on a Friday, and I know I am out of step with my colleagues here on this issue, but I think the press for “a la carte” is a mistake. I work a lot with economic issues of media, communications, and internet entities, and while I am no blindered front for the cable industry (i think they are on the wrong side of Net Neutrality, for example), the “a la carte” movement is one of those things that sounds good in principle and really ain’t so hot in practice.

    First, there is a structural problem anytime I can be forced to purchase my inputs in a way that is wholly out of step with how I am forced to sell my outputs. Unless there is a (highly unlikely) antitrust claim or regulation aginst content providers, the reality is the cable company cannot purchase programming a la carte. Lets take ESPN as an example: they have ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, ESPN-U and ESPN Classic. Lets say a ton of customers choose the first three and almost none choose the last two. So ESPN comes to the cable company and says “you have to purcahse all 5, or none” (or prices them in a way that, in essence, says the same thing). Now the a la carte rule forces the cable company — an intermediary in this transaction — to carry product at a loss. This is not only unfair, it also shows that a la carte likely wont save consumers a lot of money: those costs will get passed through as higher rates on the shows people actually do purchase.

    Second, a la carte costs a lot to administer — the Operational Support Systems, billing and customer care software changes, customer service training, signal/signal blocking management are all much more costly for a la carte. This has two implications: one, how much is a la carte worth to you, because those costs will be passed through (but now they will be costs for what you are not getting, as opposed to what you are getting but may not watch much); two, while Comcast and Time Warner may oppose this, in the end they still win because they can afford these changes more easily than small competitors. This is ultimately the “Comcast-TW Duopoly Act.”

    Third, because of the economics above, and the even harsher economics of a programming platform having to be “voted on” (and having to be funded well enough in advance to make it to a round of “voting”) programmingwill have to be more broad-based, more aimed at a low common denominator, and have to come from established production or distribution channels. Sound familiar? It is likely this will make cable more like broadcast networks (more accurately, cable will operate at two extremes – broadcast-like “safe” programming that is easily funded, and cult-end micro-programming with very low costs – what is in between will be hard to do economically).

    Finally, perhaps an extension of point #3, I personally will miss all of that stuff in the middle, channels I don’t often watch, but now and then will see something interesting, something I would not have known about to “request.” The Food Network is a good example: it took several years to really catch on. Could it have survived the early years if cable were all a la carte? Probably not. Now of course it is a huge success (and, I confess, it is a guilty pleasure of mine). A la carte will require networks to have immediate viewership; the economics will be more harsh. Part of what I enjoy about cable is the almost internet-like catch-all quality, the pastiche of often odd, narrow, content that, side-by-side, are wholly non sequiter.

    My best guess is that a la carte brings that to a rapid end, for what I would predict is actually a significant increase in per channel prices. I understand the consumer frustration and interest in this movement, but color me unconvinced.

  • Well, rats, Zeit. Here I was wallowing in one of my favorite fantasies and you come along and get all rational and factual and stuff. Just kidding. 🙂

    Actually I think the fact that soon we’ll be able to choose to get our TV service over our phone lines instead of cable or satellite will do more to lower prices than the a la carte method, anyway.

    How? By good old fashioned competition in the marketplace, that’s how. You remember, the way it was before the neocons took over the White House. When our country was called ‘America’ instead of ‘the Homeland’.

    I miss those days. I miss them a lot.

  • as long as we dont slip so far that we call it The Motherland. . .

    I think I need to play “Guns of Brixton” really loud.

  • “…as long as we dont slip so far that we call it The Motherland….”
    Comment by Zeitgeist

    Don’t forget “Fatherland,” Zeit!

    Granted, the per-channel price will have to go up. But in the end, that should still reduce the overall cost to some degree, as those programs not purchased will slip into the mists of cable-TV history. The cable companies will eventually have the numbers to wave at the specific program producers. Ratings numbers. Given ESPN as an example, those first three channels will do well, but 4 and 5 will have viewer-numbers that “suck swampwater.” Broadcasting is driven by revenues; revenues are acquired via ratings. Those last two ESPN channels will go the same route as the dodo…and Benny Hinn.

    Then again, the a la carte issue looks like the “swan song” for broadcast middlemen like the cable companies. Once the telecoms get the idea through their thick little noggins that they can simply beef up their hardware and successfuly market a pay-per-channel system on their own, the money should start turning the other way…and I can use that old Direct-TV dish for a bird-bath. The telecoms “are” big enough to tell the likes of ESPN: “Sell us want our customer-base wants, or sell us nothing.” The telecoms (damn—I hate propping for these nasty thugs, but they might be the lesser of two eveils in this particular battle) also have a global reach. They can buy a specific event directly from the point-source, thereby “pulling an end-run” on ESPN. They can also “pull a WalMart” on ESPN by simply undercutting the competitor’s (in this case, ESPN’s) price structure. End result: ESPN plays nice with the telecoms, or ESPN evaporates.

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