What hath deregulation brung?

Well, what hath it?

Yesterday I was doing an important chore at the home of a family member who has…cable TV! Of course, I haven't had cable since I went out on my own when I was 19 - but that was before the failed Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Whooooo, man! I thunk cable was bad before '96, but now that I've had probably the best look at post-1996 cable that I've had so far, I long for my younger days! But the problems aren't limited to cable.

First off, several of the most appealing channels on our cable system were out of service all day yesterday. (Yes, these were ones my family member had paid for.) No surprise, as our cable system is the great-grandsprog of the reviled Storer Cable.

The content of the channels we could get was just as heart-wrenching. For one thing, at least 3 of the local over-the-air stations were showing infomercials in the middle of the day. Strikingly, so were several of the major cable channels.

People pay $50 a month to watch infomercials now?

So I put the TV on the so-called "news" channels. What do you think they were talking about? Bush just got caught with his shit-encrusted Huggies down around his ankles ordering the CIA to forge a letter as an excuse for the war - but suffice it to say, there wasn't a word about that. The "news" channels instead dwelt on the John Edwards affair that ended in 2006.

Incidentally, this was also the top news story on the phone company's high-speed ISP's website - even though the story itself was from the day before.

See what I mean about the other side living in the past? They can't get over grade school squabbles from 25 years ago, so I guess we shouldn't expect them to get over a respected statesman's extramarital affair from 2 years ago. (Does anyone else find it suspicious that the Edwards story was released by most of the media just after the latest Bush scandal broke?)

The glut of infomercials was made possible by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the industry. This illegal law likely also contributed to the cable outage, because cable companies are now more likely to be monopolies, so they have no incentive to provide reliable service. (Before 1996, a significant percentage of American communities had cable competition.)

This monopoly culture has also contributed to the biased news coverage that plagues the media today.

My party - the Green Party - explicitly endorses repeal of the '96 telcom law in its platform. I also believe we need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, a concept that served America well for decades.

TV has the potential to educate and inform, but instead bandwidth gets wasted on infomercials and one-sided "news" coverage. It's time to bring the medium back out of the vast wasteland it's become.