Mediacom Not Winning Friends

No Good Guys in Broadcast vs, Cable Fight

You know, I'm no big fan of Sinclair Broadcasting and their tactic of sneaking conservative propaganda into their "news"casts.

But if Mediacom Cable is going to go to the mattresses with Sinclair again, they could have picked a better time for an "upgrade."

It's the same fight we saw three years ago: Sinclair wants Mediacom to pay more money for rights to CBS affiliate KGAN (and, this time, Fox affiliate KFXA) And the whole fight is strategically timed to impact the biggest broadcast events of the year: the Super Bowl and the Hawkeye bowl game.

Both sides are taking their effort to the viewers and spinning their spin. But Mediacom's not winning friends this week. As luck would have it, the cable company is "upgrading" its internet service. Email has been interrupted for days at a time, and once it's back up, the spam percentage seems to have climbed. Last night my home had no television or internet service. TV was back this AM but the net was still down.

Gotta love private sector monopolies. Remember a few years back when McLeod got a referendum passed to run a competing cable system, and then right after that they went broke?

Way back in 2005 when I was working on the public power death march, we did some polling that showed Mediacom being far, far less popular than MidAmerican. We lost the public power fight two to one, but if we were voting this week I think Mediacom would lose by about the same margin... meantime, get your rabbit ears ready, Hawkeye fans.