U R Here | Thomas Dean
Goliath vs. Goliath Mediacom battles communications giant Sinclair while local coverage gets squished.
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inclair’s at it again. No, not the green dinosaur of fossil fuel. The other lumbering giant—the communications one, the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, owners of Channel 2 in Cedar Rapids, KGAN, the area’s CBS affiliate. Sinclair is television’s version of Clear Channel, a politically conservative media empire that infiltrates, according to their numbers, 22 percent of American televisions. Our local area has had dustups with Sinclair before. Sinclair local newscasts contain daily conservative editorials by Corporate Vice President Mark Hyman called “The Point,” most of which are full of howling distortions and inaccuracies. During the 2004 election, Sinclair attempted to ram a John Kerry-bashing “documentary” down every local affiliate’s throat. And in 2005, after a local UI adjunct professor dared to post opinions critical of Sinclair on his blog, Hyman hit the national airwaves with a screed that falsely accused his critic of teaching students how to plagiarize. For these specific, and for more general philosophical reasons, I boycott Channel 2’s local newscast. The current dilemma that Sinclair is forcing upon our local community is the possibility of our local cable television monopoly— er—franchise, Mediacom, losing the broadcast rights to Channel 2. My interest here
This isn’t the first time Sinclair has run afoul of the public. This Twin Cities man protested Sinclair’s negatively-charged John Kerry “documentary.”
is not really to debate the merits of the two sides of the argument. Let’s leave it at a “he said/she said” argument. Sinclair is claiming Mediacom won’t pony up fair compensation for Channel 2, and Mediacom says Sinclair is gouging them unfairly. The two have been playing chicken for some months—this is not the first time they’ve played this exact game— and when this column appears, either one will have blinked (excuse me, a compromise will have been reached) or there will be no Channel 2 on our cable menu. The outcome, either way, really does not alter the basic point I’d like to address: the lack of community care by a distant corporation. One of the fundamental beliefs I hold, and the underpinning of much of this column, is that the bonds of locality—of place and com-
munity—are important because they involve care. It’s a no-brainer, really. We care for what we are close to. We care for the people we know, we care for the welfare of the community in which we live, we care for the natural world right outside our door. Sure, we care for abstract principles like freedom and democracy (and the First Amendment), we care about the poor and suffering in general, and we care about “the environment” in its totality. But the strongest bonds, the bonds from which those larger attachments and concerns grow, are our connections to the local. And the problem with distant corporations like Sinclair is that they don’t care about the local community. There’s no arguing that the raison d’être of capitalism is profit. Many argue that such human benefits as freedom and community prosperity can accrue from capitalist enterprise. To some extent, history has shown that there is partial truth in this maxim. But the problem with this argument is that the raison d’être will inevitably trump the after-effect. To put it as a political aphorism, in a corporate environment profits come before people. This is the main reason why large corporations—manufacturers, chain stores, etc.—can be so problematic for a community. When the bottom line falters, the corporation bails, no matter what bromides about providing jobs seduced the community members at first, no matter what corporate welfare the city administration lavished at the corporation’s feet to lure it there in the first place, not matter what zoning exceptions were
Who is Affected? Mediacom serves customers in 24 states, specializing in areas that do not have a large metropolitan population. According to Mediacom, the cable, Internet and phone company serves 1500 communities nationwide.
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| dec ‘06-jan ‘07
These communities are clustered into larger service areas. Of these, 20 service areas (x’s) carry one or more Sinclair station, all of which are affected by the current conflict.