Reply #4: Martin has been recommending a la carte for several years, therefore

[McCamy Taylor]

it seemed very odd to me that in the spring of 2005 he allowed himself to be quoted as meeting with industry execs and assuring them that he was a "hands off" kind of guy who was only going to recommend family package, which was a much more benign (from Disney's point of view) legislation from Congress, rather than a la carte cable legislation. Presumably, Congress would listen to the FCC head, and if he did not think a la carte cable was a good idea, Sens. McCain and Stevens would scrap it. Why did he change his mind at that time? Why did ABC decide to proceed with "The Path to 9/11" the Hindenburg of propaganda films almost immediately afterwards? The timing stinks.

Recently, Martin has begun an aggressive push for a la carte cable once again. From any other White House, this would imply that Bush-Cheney do not care what the corporate media thinks about them. However, look at my post about the administration's dealings with CNN. Note how they handled the Adelphia acquisitions. The FCC, which should have had a Republican laisez-fair ideology, made AOL Time-Warner wait an almost unheard of 404 days before it got the A-Ok for that deal to go through. Why? It is consistent with the carrot-stick game that the administration has played with the corporate media.The wait occured in late 2005 and 2006, in the run up to the 2006 Congressional elections. CNN made changes in its programming during that time that were friendly to the GOP. I wonder if Martin is currently applying the stick to Disney and other cable channel owners, getting them in line for the 2008 elections.

No, there is no way to be sure what any one of the numerous administration actions in relation to the various members of the corporate media means. But taken together, they suggest a pattern---and the pattern certainly explains some atrocious behavior on the part of some news networks which have exposed them to ridicule---like ABC's "The Path to 9/11" (ABC's entertainment wing, not the news wing, but since it was supposed to be a docudrama, it might as well have been ABC News).