HEY! I do! Often!
rotest: And it irritates the heck out of me that on $haw's @#%&!!! cable service it's not placed in the 'basic channels'.
In Wyoming, the native lobby (mostly Shoshone, but some others as well) got their channel on the "basic offerings" category, but they had to fight for it.
Wyoming's an interesting state, because the white population is extremely polarized between Republican and Democrat, such that the two most popular channels were Fox and PBS, but the natives were feeling left out by both, and they couldn't find any other station on the dial to represent their issues.
They already had their own community channel generating tacky community-channel production, but they wanted it to go state-wide to reach the Shoshone diaspora, and they wanted it on the standard-offerings list because to make it optional would mean having to pay extra, and Shoshone are not rich.
When asked what justified their channel being on the standard-offerings list, it came up that a native channel would be too "special interest", so the natives said they would also offer non-native coverage from a middle-ground point of view, and they used as their examples the CBC - when poled, 50% of Canadians say it's too liberal, while 50% say it's too conservative - because there was no middle-ground programming for whites in Wyoming, and that although there were many moderate channels to choose from, none of them would touch on things from a Wyoming perspective because the audience was too small a market-share of the US population.
The carriers' countered with a question about why they needed a "moderate, objective" channel when nobody among the whites was complaining about a lack of objective coverage... they weren't fighting, and indeed, although white Wyomingites are extremely polarized between Republican and Democrat, they are also extremely respectful of each others' political tendencies, such that they don't argue about it.
Indeed that's true, and I asked my Wyoming relatives about that - how in the same family there could be staunch Republicans on one side, and staunch Democrats on the other, yet they'd get along just fine at family gatherings, and they told me it's because conflicts only feed lawyers, who depend on conflict to make a living...
... whereupon an Uncle went into a story about his years as a young man working in Chicago, where he would watch informal groups of lawyers do two-pronged actions of first fueling conflicts by fanning into flames any differences between groups they could find (whereupon they'd jump in on both sides and argue against each other in court with twinkles in their eyes as the bills wracked up, with nobody noticing that the lawyers were friends and colleagues outside the courtroom), and second by doing their best to crap all over any signs of objectivity that might lead to consensus among the groups.
He said the eastern lawyers' number one fear was that people would get rational and start settling their differences objectively in order to reach a consensus, and he went on about how Wyomingites were perfectly capable of achieving a consensus with or without rational objectivity by virtue of their guns, and he went on to explain how in the Wyoming state of mind, guns to keep the peace were saving them a fortune in lawyer's fees, against whom he had a serious issue after having watched how they operate back east.
In the end, the Shoshone got their state-wide basic-service classification, but it wasn't by offering a service that would have native programming plus fill the middle-ground niche of coverage for whites... it was by virtue of the simple fact that they were a significant percentage of the state's population spread out over a wide diaspora *and* they had to promise to only offer programming relevant to natives, and believe it or not, part of the deal was that they stop talking about the CBC, because, according to rumor, the CBC was already being offered on their "special channels" menu for those Wyomingites who wanted middle-ground coverage, and they didn't want to worry about it being pushed into standard-offering classification like they were being pestered to in Montana and North Dakota, plus their lawyers just hated the CBC in general.
I can believe that, because I dated a girl from Montreal for several years, who had a brother and a cousin who were lawyers, and they *hated* the CBC. I would ask her why, and mostly she'd just shake her head and change the subject, but if you got enough wine into her she's grumble things about it being bad for business.
Current members of the board of directors of Quebecor Inc. are: Françoise Bertrand - former Chairperson CRTC (well, well... I think they're gonna get whatever they want!); Robert Dutton - RONA CEO; Jean La Couture - just seems to sit on Boards, does he actually work?; Jean-Marc Eustache - Transat AT CEO & lots of Board sitting; Pierre Laurin - another Board sitter, seems like that's all they do really;
Brian Mulroney - Ah hah! Now this signals backroom dealings, he hasn't even been cleared in the Hans Schreiber affair yet! (Schreiber's sitting in jail in Germany); Jean Neveu.
Does this all mean that the CRTC is playing it cute & the deal is a done one already; it's all over 'cept for divying up the cut, etc? Not that it makes any diff to me, I have a remote (well, we each have one - makes for interesting tv watching at times :violent3
unless yet another of the few channels that has good content gets bumped by them. :roll:
Oh well ain't that sweet.
You know, collusions like that are exactly what the Reform Party used to stand against, but what with the Reform Party taking over the Progressive Conservative party and renaming it the Conservative party, now it looks like they're playing the same games.
If Harper ever got a majority I'd feel like it's time to emigrate, but believe it or not I'm actually starting to empathize with hard-core Reform Party supporters - whom I figure are just too blinkin' extreme - and how ticked they must be feeling about some of Harper's actions.
