I Hate It When Mom And Dad Fight

Grab the popcorn:

For the third time in a month, Dish Network customers are missing out on popular programming due to a dispute with a channel owner.

This time it’s Fox News, one of the most popular cable channels in the United States. The channel disappeared from Dish (DISH)’s lineup shortly after midnight Eastern time Sunday because Dish’s contract to carry Fox News expired before it could be renewed. It was still blacked out on Monday.

Free hand of the market, y’all. Dish is a private company and they can do whatever they want.

I’d like to think Dish customers who watch Fox will be forced to watch “real news” but Dish opted to replace Fox with Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, so there is still a steady diet of lies and wackaloonery for the RWNJs to digest.

In its 18-year history, Fox News has never been blacked out by any major television distributor. This dispute will be particularly interesting to watch because Fox has an extraordinarily loyal audience — a “base,” so to speak, that might be motivated to drop Dish.

That’s what Fox says it wants.

I’m not so sure about that. Having just gone through the awful ordeal of changing providers, I think most people will just wait it out. Changing your cable/satellite provider is like changing your health insurance, it’s so confusing with all of the different plans, different bundling options, etc. It’s a huge fucking hassle. We wouldn’t have bothered if our internet hadn’t been so outdated.

Anyway, most people are locked into contracts, and Fox’s “base” are mostly old people who are flummoxed by a lot of this stuff already (I can say that because while I’m not a Fox viewer, I am an old person completely irritated that we have to go through this BS. Back in my day you just turned the TV on and everything you wanted was right there! Off my lawn!)

This is particularly rich:

Earlier this week, Fox News Channel’s parent company 21st Century Fox started to warn that another blackout was looming. On Saturday, Fox ran warnings on-screen that urged its fans to lobby the satellite provider and said “don’t let Dish control the news you watch.”

Um, I’m sorry, but no matter who your provider is they are controlling the news you watch. That’s the glorious, shiny, sparkly, awesome free hand of the market at work, you morons.

Maybe their grandchildren will tell them they can watch all of this stuff on the internet … as long as their ISP doesn’t wrench control of their internet speeds.