Gagging on Cox

(Sorry for the post title, I couldn’t resist.)

So here we go again – the old 40/29 vs. Cox Cable feud is coming to a head. Of course I’m rooting for my 40/29 homies, or ex-homies as the case may be, but at the same time, from the responses already posted on the unusually subdued Arkansas TV News Blog (by five responses, it’s normally a lot nastier and bitchier than that – seriously, these people waste no time, well, relatively speaking, since most of them read and respond to that blog while on the clock, but anyway…), you can already see the logic that you know has to be running through the minds of most viewers who are aware of the problem: “oh well, we’ll just watch KTUL out of Tulsa.” Bit of a double-edged sword there, that Tulsa feed. (From my understanding, the reason the KTUL feed has never been syndexed – i.e. blacked out for syndication exclusivity – is because the feed from the National Weather Service in Tulsa comes in on an audio subchannel from that feed. Whether or not that’s accurate is another matter entirely.) I’ve been known to switch over to KTUL myself on such occasions as Lost being pre-empted by an Arkansas basketball game that I wasn’t particularly interested in. You can bet that others have done the same too. Question is – how much hardball can the station really play when the end result would be everyone just shrugging and changing channels?

Good luck with that, guys. For what it’s worth, it reminds me of one time, back at our rental house, when Cox called repeatedly, insisting that we were behind on payments (we actually weren’t). My wife handed me the portable phone and said “Guess who’s calling again? It’s Cox.”

“No dear,” I replied, “it’s pricks.”