What stupid thing did the GOP say or do this time? Episode 3!

[NovaSaber]

I strongly suspect that the only thing his conservative family meant by him "moving to the left" was that he was specifically becoming less of a bigot on trans rights (and likely on LGBT+ issues in general).

And if "not being a bigot" (even as a motive for a violent crime) is seen as being on "the left", that's saying more about how bad "the right" is than anything else.

 

[Axaday]

I strongly suspect that the only thing his conservative family meant by him "moving to the left" was that he was specifically becoming less of a bigot on trans rights (and likely on LGBT+ issues in general).

And if "not being a bigot" (even as a motive for a violent crime) is seen as being on "the left", that's saying more about how bad "the right" is than anything else.

Yeah. My dad told me a while back that I started getting Liberal when I went to college, but seriously. I didn't until like 2008. But I had some argument with my Dad about something in college and neither of us remembers what it was. And to him, "Uh oh, kid went to college and turned Liberal".

 

[The Predaking]

Yeah. My dad told me a while back that I started getting Liberal when I went to college, but seriously. I didn't until like 2008. But I had some argument with my Dad about something in college and neither of us remembers what it was. And to him, "Uh oh, kid went to college and turned Liberal".

You know what made me break away from the Republican Propaganda? Mitt Romney. Of all the people that have come out after him that were so much worse, it was Mitt Romney that made me see what the Republicans are. All the Leverage Buyouts that he and his company used to tank so many great American franchises, killing tens of thousands of jobs, destroying pensions, and just being all out horrible broke me.

To be fair, on the other side of that equation, we had one of the best orators and presidents of my lifetime, and that had me take a good long look at both parties and their policies/agendas.

 

[Dekafox]

 

[Pale Rider]

You know what made me break away from the Republican Propaganda? Mitt Romney. Of all the people that have come out after him that were so much worse, it was Mitt Romney that made me see what the Republicans are. All the Leverage Buyouts that he and his company used to tank so many great American franchises, killing tens of thousands of jobs, destroying pensions, and just being all out horrible broke me.

To be fair, on the other side of that equation, we had one of the best orators and presidents of my lifetime, and that had me take a good long look at both parties and their policies/agendas.

The fact that you and Axaday have evolved gives me hope. I recall you both being on "the other side" during the GWB years and I'm glad to see that things can actually change for the better.

 

[KidTDragon]

View attachment 31456

So the lesson is: When dealing with corporations, whoever proves themselves the greater threat to the bottom line wins.

 

[Pocket]

And it's honestly wild that that's somehow still us.

 

[The Predaking]

Disney+ really gives consumers a way to let Disney know when they have screwed up.

 

[Ironbite4]

$4 billion in profit vanishing overnight might've been a drop in the bucket to Disney but the thing is....that's a lot of money to just go poof. And for what? Appeasing a man who'll never be appeased?

Ironbite-Disney needs to think about other decisions it's made and act accordingly.

 

[Pocket]

The funny thing is, I think it's mostly the politically-middle-of-the-road people, the kind of people who get called "normies" and "consoomers" by the left and "NPCs" by the right, who made this happen. Because that's the sort of people who actually pay for Disney+ and trips to their theme parks, and the sort of people who actually watch Jimmy freaking Kimmel and would miss him not being on the air. Not us radicals who pretend we're still in our 20s, haven't owned a TV since college, don't pay for anything less essential than our cell phone plans, and haven't given a crap about late night talk show hosts since NBC dropped Conan. And as proof, you need look no further than the fact that Kimmel won and Colbert didn't.

 

[Rhinox]

Sinclair apparently still won't air Kimmel, but we'll see how long that lasts.

 

[Fullstrength Motleypuss]

Man, Disney PR spinning so hard on this one I'm surprised they finished without passing out.

 

[Pocket]

Sinclair apparently still won't air Kimmel, but we'll see how long that lasts.

If nothing else, anyone who was unsure whether their local ABC affiliate was Sinclair-owned or not is about to find out.

 

[Anonymous X]

Hang on, let me ask this as someone who doesn’t understand how US television works: so your local station could broadcast ABC (which is what I understand by affiliate), but also be owned by a different company who isn’t ABC? Am I grasping that correctly?

 

[Ultra Magnus13]

Hang on, let me ask this as someone who doesn’t understand how US television works: so your local station could broadcast ABC (which is what I understand by affiliate), but also be owned by a different company who isn’t ABC? Am I grasping that correctly?

More or less, and they have a degree of autonomy on what they want to broadcast. I haven't watched broadcast TV in forever, but as a kid "Prime Time" was usually pretty standard, so pretty much ever ABC affiliate would have the same programing block, but outside of that things could be way different.

Both NBC affiliates I would watch showed SNL at 1030, but afterwords one ran old SCTV episodes and another ran Police Academy the Series. One PBS station ran Red Dwarf, Doctor Who, Monty Python, Are You Being Served, Mr Bean and other Brit comes, the other only ran Farm report and other painfully dull shows.

 

[wonko the sane?]

And it's honestly wild that that's somehow still us.

Not really? The boycotts and cancelations aren't just american: they're global. There's more good people in the world than there are assholes in america.

 

[Steevy Maximus]

Hang on, let me ask this as someone who doesn’t understand how US television works: so your local station could broadcast ABC (which is what I understand by affiliate), but also be owned by a different company who isn’t ABC? Am I grasping that correctly?

To further clarify what UM13 posted:
There are hundreds of local broadcast stations across the US, regulated by the FCC (due to "limited availability" of over the air broadcast signals). To cover costs and get programming, stations would partner with a national content provider, becoming affiliates to the likes of NBC, CBS and ABC (and later Fox). The national providers would give local stations prime time (typically 6/7 pm until 10pm) programming and (until the early 2000s) Saturday morning cartoon blocks in exchange for shared advertising costs or for financial incentives for the larger networks to expand coverage for programming.

But local stations also had all the other hours of the day to fill (some would stop broadcasting between 1-5am due to lack of viewers to justify operating, the 90s would bring infomercials to fill that), which is why "syndication" became such a hot thing in the 80s: instead of selling to a major network and competing against all the other players, smaller companies could market directly to stations looking to fill their schedules between the programming blocks provided by the major networks.

That's a big reason many of us have different memories of shows in the late 80s into the 90s: depending on your station, you may or may not be exposed to certain shows. I never saw the Hasbro PowerBlock locally, I never saw Beast Wars until the season 2 end run on Cartoon Network and never saw any of season 1 until it migrated to Fox (which handled after school and Saturday morning cartoon blocks in the 90s).

 

[wonko the sane?]

Before cable, the television network in the US (and canada.) looked a lot like the cellular network does now. Towers filling air space.

On clear days, I used to be able to get vermont PBS on the rabbits ears on my old 13 inch TV. But like everyone else at that period in time: we bought a splicer, drilled some holes, ran some cable and a year after we bought it: my very first bedroom tv had cable. We (my brother and I. We shared a bedroom then.) left the rabbit ears on cause if we didn't, dad would have stolen them.

 

[Anonymous X]

To further clarify what UM13 posted:
There are hundreds of local broadcast stations across the US, regulated by the FCC (due to "limited availability" of over the air broadcast signals). To cover costs and get programming, stations would partner with a national content provider, becoming affiliates to the likes of NBC, CBS and ABC (and later Fox). The national providers would give local stations prime time (typically 6/7 pm until 10pm) programming and (until the early 2000s) Saturday morning cartoon blocks in exchange for shared advertising costs or for financial incentives for the larger networks to expand coverage for programming.

But local stations also had all the other hours of the day to fill (some would stop broadcasting between 1-5am due to lack of viewers to justify operating, the 90s would bring infomercials to fill that), which is why "syndication" became such a hot thing in the 80s: instead of selling to a major network and competing against all the other players, smaller companies could market directly to stations looking to fill their schedules between the programming blocks provided by the major networks.

That's a big reason many of us have different memories of shows in the late 80s into the 90s: depending on your station, you may or may not be exposed to certain shows. I never saw the Hasbro PowerBlock locally, I never saw Beast Wars until the season 2 end run on Cartoon Network and never saw any of season 1 until it migrated to Fox (which handled after school and Saturday morning cartoon blocks in the 90s).

Oh thanks, that explains a lot!

Very different to here in the UK, where we have nationwide television channels due to our geography, and all of them owner controlled.*

*

Spoiler

(To clarify, ITV, our largest commercial, as in non-BBC, network was regionalised up until 2002, with different names across the UK – for example my local provider was TVS, as in Television South, and later Meridian when the contractor changed. After that, it was just generic ITV, or STV in Scotland. And UTV in Northern Ireland. They all show all exactly the same shows though, apart from local news programmes, bigger regional variations in scheduling mostly disappearing by the early ‘90s.)

 

[Pocket]

To add to Steevy's post: traditional over-the-air stations/channels remain separate from the networks they pull content from, and despite a glut of content they could be pushing, network feeds still have limited hours of operation leaving space (afternoons, often all day Sunday, overnight) for local or cheaply sourced programming, and I'm pretty sure this is by FCC mandate, to ensure people have a way to watch the local news, weather forecast, and free coverage of local sportsball games. Cable-only channels, however, operate a 24/7 feed relayed directly by the cable companies. If there were ever a conflict between a cable company and a particular channel's content, their only recourse would be to drop the entire channel from their lineup, possibly along with every other channel owned by the same media company. This has happened before, with one of the major cable providers (Cox, maybe?) threatening to drop MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and a few others over a dispute with Viacom. Also there's PBS, which doesn't provide a feed at all; they just have a bunch of content and the stations have to pick and choose what to air and build their own broadcast schedules.

Over-the-air TV still exists, despite occasional efforts from cable providers to persuade the FCC to shut it down. Due to former FCC limits on how many stations one company can own, most stations are not owned by the same companies as their affiliate networks. Wikipedia has a list of current and former exceptions; you'll notice that ABC has the fewest of any of them. Even under the much more lax current regulations, no company can own enough channels to provide coverage to more than 40% of the country, so it would be impossible for a network with nationwide coverage to own all of its affiliates. And no one wants to own a station that runs content from a rival network. So what's happened is that we've seen a rise in "station swallowers" like Sinclair that don't care whose affiliates they buy; they just want as many eyeballs as possible watching their politically-slanted national news stories being read word-for-word by hundreds of "local news" anchors across the country, as John Oliver explains below: