The Hlog

Thanks for nothing, Sinclair

I had to see it to believe it, so I had my television on KGAN, the CBS affiliate in Cedar Rapids, at midnight Friday. Sure enough, Channel 2 went black. Actually, it went blue. Black or blue, it's a fight Mediacom subscribers like myself have lost. We now are without a CBS affiliate, a first in my lifetime.

That means no New England-New York Jets football game on Sunday, not that I was going to watch it anyway. But it also means no AFC Championship game in a couple weeks, and no Super Bowl in a month. Oh, no NCAA men's basketball tournament, too.

Why? Because Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., the owner of KGAN, as well as KDSM in Des Moines and 20 other of its stations around the country that were carried by Mediacom, wanted beaucoup bucks from Mediacom. The two sides never reached an agreement before last night's deadline, thus 800,000 of Mediacom's 1.3 million subscribers are affected. Including me. Which is why I care.

Sinclair says blah, blah, blah, and Mediacom says blah, blah, blah. But while I haven't met a cable company yet that would win any humanitarian awards, and won't hold my breath to wait for my Mediacom bill to get reduced a few bucks because KGAN is no longer offered (though it certainly should), this Sinclair outfit is something else. In 2004, Sinclair refused to allow the eight ABC stations it owned to broadcast an airing of a Nightline tribute to the 721 U.S. soldiers killed up to that time in the 2003 invastion and occupation of Iraq, calling it a "political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq." Both supporters and opponents of the war got ticked off at Sinclair for that.

Of course, later that same year Sinclair ordered all of its affiliates to preempt prime-time programming to air a documentary critical of U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry two weeks before the national election. Protests resulted in a more balanced news program being aired.


I'm not going to air a dirty laundry list of some of Sinclair' s actions over the last several years, because you can easily find one elsewhere on the Internet. If you live in an area with a Sinclair station, ask yourself if that station's news operation has improved or worsened since Sinclair's takeover. I know the answer where I live.

For the last several weeks, KGAN ran a large scrawl at the bottom of its programming, offering people a rebate if they switched to DirecTV.  Which is why I can't and won't do it. I'll get around to getting some rabbit ears to pulling in KGAN at home. In the meantime, I'll miss seeing David Letterman's show and "60 Minutes," though I just pretend that I'll miss "60 Minutes" to try to sound like a smart guy. But it's not like CBS is showing "The Office" or "Lost" or "Friday Night Lights" or any of the best prime-time shows on television these days, and it sure doesn't have anything to compare to the best series HBO has to offer.

Just writing this makes me feel pretty foolish, because there are so many real outrages in the world that need drums pounded for them. But when you yank the Super Bowl and NCAA Tournament and the Masters out of my house, you invoke an old Merle Haggard lyric. You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me.

Oh, it just occurred to me that KGAN is the self-titled "Home of the Hawks." That means Mediacom subscribers in Cedar Rapids and other parts of Eastern Iowa won't have access to a large number of University of Iowa men's basketball games. Maybe the Hawkeyes should offer rebates of their own, to try to get television viewers to instead attend their games in person.

Just trying to help. And now, we return to our regularly scheduled programming.


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