while you were sleeping
...he snuck in and loofa-ed all over your cable bill.
DCRTV, via Super Sam Smith:
The word is that Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel is hiking its subscriber fee to cable systems by 50 to 75-cents, to about $1 per month. And that NYC-based Cablevision has agreed to pay the hike. Which it will, of course, pass along to its subscribers in the form of an annual rate hike. Next up to deal with Murdoch - area cable giant Comcast, which is the nation's largest cable TV company. Also "in play" in the negotiations are continued carriage of Murdoch's many other channels like Speed, FX, Fox Sports, and National Geographic, along with his local Fox (WTTG) and My Network TV (WDCA, WUTB) stations.
And it's just a matter of time before that rough beast lurches out this way, and your way too. But, in a way, you have to sympathize with Rupert; Fox is just trying to recoup on what's been a kind of vanity press, albeit a relatively influential one, in the way that that crazy kid who ate glue and shaved weird shapes into his head and tortured the neighborhood dogs when you were little was influential. David Brock noted in "The Republican Noise Machine" that Murdoch took tens of millions in losses over the last few years in order to keep Fox News afloat. And it's not like people were clamoring for it in the first place, really:
To accelerate its adoption by cable companies, Fox News paid systems up to $11 per subscriber to distribute the network. This contrasted with the normal practice, in which cable operators paid stations carriage fees for the programming of channels. When Time Warner bought out Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, a federal antitrust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to Time Warner's own CNN. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news network, instead of Fox News. Fox News claimed that this violated an agreement to carry Fox News, and Ailes used his connections to persuade Mayor Giuliani to carry Fox News and Bloomberg Television on two underutilized city-owned cable channels, which he did.
New York City also threatened to revoke Time Warner's cable franchise for not carrying Fox News.
A lawsuit was filed by Time Warner against the City of New York claiming undue interference and for inappropriate use of the city's educational channels for commercial programming. News Corporation countered with an antitrust lawsuit against Time Warner for unfairly protecting CNN. This led to an acrimonious battle between Murdoch and Turner, with Turner publicly comparing Murdoch to Adolf Hitler while Murdoch's New York Post ran an editorial questioning Turner's sanity. Giuliani's motives were also questioned, as his then-wife was a producer at Murdoch-owned WNYW-TV. In the end, Time Warner and News Corporation signed a settlement agreement to permit Fox News to be carried on New York City cable system beginning in October 1997, and to all of Time Warner's cable systems by 2001, though Time Warner still does not carry Fox News in all areas.
And who do you know, fellow citizen of teevee land?
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