IP Democracy: Rush Limbaugh Opposes A La Carte

Well, if anyone isn’t convinced a la carte delivery of cable programming is a bad idea, Rush Limbaugh is here to set them straight. That’s right, the right-wing pundit devoted a segment of his show yesterday to panning the legislation planned by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) that would mandate cable delivery of individual channels, as opposed to packaged tiers of programming.

As usual, Limbaugh focuses his fine analytical eye on the issue:

Now, it sounds good, and some people are all for this because they don’t like the smut and the perverted garbage that’s coming into their home on channels that they don’t watch. So they say, “Yeah, give me this à la cart, and I won’t have to buy that rotgut stuff, and I will save money.” You won’t. That’s the come-on.

Somehow, Limbaugh believes that a la carte is a European idea or practice, and therefore it’s no good.

You want to emulate Europe? Go ahead and emulate Europe. Let’s get Europe’s gasoline prices over here tomorrow, too. Go ahead, you want to emulate Europe, and let’s get their yellow-bellied spines, let’s import some. Well, we have half a country with that already. See? We don’t want any more what Europe has to offer. Besides, cable in Europe, give me a break.

My favorite part, though, is Limbaugh’s expert insight into and razor-sharp explication of advertising and audience aggregation economics.

I mean, there’s so much oddball stuff out there now, but all of it has some kind of an audience. The one area that it could really shake things up if this were to happen, let’s take a look at just the cable news channels. CNN, their ratings and so forth, I forget how many people, but they also go out and sell advertising on the basis that they are available in 90 million homes because that’s cable’s penetration in the country right now, 90 million homes using television and cable, rough figure. Now, they may only get 300,000 of them at a time watching, but they can say we are available, and if we do promotion and marketing we can expand our audience.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 11, 2006 12:13 PM to IP Democracy