In a recent example of Obama government run amok, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—with five presidentially appointed commissioners—has ordered a private cable company to put a paid news channel in a particular spot on the lineup.
It seems bizarre that a federal agency is wasting resources meddling into such matters, but this is government on heavy duty steroids. Since Obama moved into the White House, the bloated government has taken over the nation’s healthcare system (ordering private citizens to purchase a product or service they may not want), banned school bake sales to control our kids’ diet and intruded into many other aspects of private life.
Heck, the administration even violated the nation’s cherished free press by secretly obtaining the work and personal phone records of reporters and editors at one of the nation’s largest news organizations. This is the sort of thing you see in communist regimes and dictatorships (like China and Cuba), a deplorable act few imagined would ever take place in the United States. Even liberals who otherwise praise Obama called the spying an “unacceptable abuse of power.”
It’s as if there is no stopping the madness of this unprecedented government intrusion into private life. So, why not tell cable companies where to place channels? Seems benign compared to some of the other stuff Big Brother has done since Obama became the nation’s commander-in-chief. The FCC, which governs mass media communication via television, radio, cable, satellite and wire, didn’t like where one major cable company placed a certain financial news outlet so it ordered the private business to move the channel.
Because of the government shutdown the FCC’s website is unavailable so the order can’t be accessed, but a news reportoutlines how it all went down. Cable companies often group channels with similar themes so that they are located in adjacent spots in the lineup. In this case the cable company, Comcast, isolated Bloomberg News in a neighborhood far away from other news outlets and the company claimed it was hurting business. Bloomberg hired a bunch of lobbyists to pressure the FCC, claiming discrimination because Comcast owns the business news channel CNBC, a popular competitor that has a great spot on the lineup.
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