Fair & Balanced Preemptions
Category: TV & Radio...
Posted Friday, August 31, 2007 at 03:05 PM [GMT-6]

OK, I lied. I'm posting. So sue me. [No, please don't.] I couldn't resist sharing this.

I just received an email from XM Radio publicizing its upcoming college football broadcasts (this will be the first year that XM will broadcast selected Big 12 games, by the way). In the fine print at the bottom of the page was this note:

Starting September 1st and continuing on Saturdays through late November, we may preempt certain news, talk, and entertainment channels so that we can air select college football games. The channels subject to preemption include Air America, The Weather Channel and America Right.

Someone obviously has made some very careful programming decisions in an attempt to be fair. Unfortunately, knowing human nature, they'll succeed only in ticking off just about everybody: liberals (Air America*), conservatives (America Right), and everyone else (The Weather Channel). But you have to give 'em credit for the symmetry.

One question I do have for the XM publicists is which of those three channels falls into the category of "entertainment"?

Now, who's up for monitoring XM through the season to track the number of times each station actually gets preempted, in order to lodge a claim of bias? Surely someone will perform that "valuable" public service for us.

*I thought these guys went bankrupt. Financially, that is.

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Comments

The preemptions should only be a problem on Saturdays in September, when XM has the college football channels plus the Major League Baseball games to cope with. Once the baseball regular season is over, liberals, conservatives and meteorology fans should get their channels back.

Posted by: John at September 1, 2007 12:41 AM

This post was worth coming out of hibernation!

Posted by: Jen P at September 1, 2007 10:06 AM

I blame Nate Davis.

Of course, that could be because he was CEO of a company I worked for for about 6 months before he went to XM. So I know the kind of lousy mismanagement he's capable of - I've experienced it (and fought with him about it) personally.

I seriously want to get Tim Sirius for his birthday - but now that they're merging with XM....I just dunno.

That said, I guess it's good that they're listing a channel from either side. Right?

Posted by: beth at September 1, 2007 11:26 AM

You know I'd be all over that for you, Eric, but I can't afford XM service (or the hardware to receive it) just now. I bought a new PDA and still haven't sold my Trek road bike. An alternative would be to wait until I've mastered enough ASP.NET to do some moonlight jobs, but I'm guessing you'd need me to get on the XM thing before then.

Posted by: Foo at September 2, 2007 07:23 AM
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