Today is another glorious day in the People's Republic of Corporate Controlled Media. (Bend over, little consumer, and pass the lube.)
As some of you may know, Comcast recently screwed up big time; one of their techs went out to someone's house on a repair call, curled up on the couch, and fell asleep. The customer video taped it and *boom* ...suddenly the video's everywhere, and everyone knows about it. Nightline recently discussed the issue on the air. Do you have Comcast cable TV? If you live in Chicago, this is almost a given, since they have complete monopoly control over most areas. I live in the western suburbs, and there are no competing cable TV providers here or in any neighboring burbs. There were no competing providers in Hyde Park, where I used to live before this. The problem here is that Comcast happily censored the episode. Instead of the full version, Comcast viewers saw an incredibly brief mention of the incident, following by a *very* rough cut into an unrelated story. A first year film student could have done a better job of making this subtle...as it is, this was fairly obvious. Want to see what I'm talking about? The Comcast version and original versions of the episode are available here: http://tinyurl.com/h5yqk Pretty much speaks for itself. Following in the footsteps of AOL, which blocks content critical of AOL, Comcast has decided to take more direct control over what you do and don't see on the air...including what you think of as "news". Now that's customer service for you...not only has the problem been taken care of, they're so sure it's been taken care of that they don't want to waste your time letting Nightline tell you about it to begin with. What's next? Subcontract this to the Chinese government for some real expertise? Man, what would I do without Comcast censoring my news? Wouldn't I be deluged with all this awful information? Good thing we don't have network neutrality; that would have been a real bummer. Imagine Comcast not being able to censor websites and email the same way they censor what I see on TV? Though *of course* Comcast would never censor something as fundamental as a news service...I mean, that would completely go against what consumers want, right? And if they did it, they'd lose millions of customers overnight, etc? And they *promise* that they have no current plans to censor anything, since they'd lose customers. They're right. If I had another cable provider to turn to, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Sure, some of us hate the news. Sure, it's biased. But for your cable TV provider to be able to legally censor what news you are allowed to see is ridiculous. As ridiculous as the lack of network neutrality protections in the United States that allows this both for our TV and our internet access. Does anyone see any difference between the Indian and Chinese governments censoring content they don't like and Comcast censoring content they don't like? Why do more of us know about China censoring their media when Comcast is doing it to us, right here in the good ol' USA? Dave. ------------------- Dave A. Chakrabarti Projects Coordinator CTCNet Chicago [EMAIL PROTECTED] (708) 919 1026 ------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
