You pay for Faux News, but not for the NY Times?

More than a decade ago, after returning from our Europe trip, I contacted the cable company and asked them whether I could get rid of CNN and instead get CNN-international, because the international version of CNN was infinitely better then. The cable company said I could purchase the CNN-international channel at an extra cost, and explained that there was no possibility of picking and choosing my own channels.

I hated this bundling then, and hate it even now. After Faux News came on to the scene, and the more it became insanely partisan, I simply programmed the television to skip that channel when we surfed looking for something interesting to watch.

You can see, therefore, why I like the way Peter Osnos frames this television channel bundling and contrasts with the "free" newspaper/magazine journalism:

Once aware that they are supporting Bill O'Reilly et al, most of my interlocutors shrug and say something about bundling charges on cable or their combined bill, which includes broadband access and even, in many cases, telephones. Paying these bills, which on average are well over $100 per month, is routine now in the overwhelming majority of American homes. There was a movement a few years ago to consider "a la carte" pricing for cable, which would allow customers to choose the channels they wanted. That concept went nowhere because it meant that only popular channels would flourish. Those favored by smaller numbers--my relatively esoteric cable favorites are the Independent Film Channel, Turner Classic Movies, and C-Span-would probably disappear or certainly suffer.

In the current economic media crisis, cable companies have remained consistently strong because of this fee structure, even in the face of a reduced (but steady) stream of advertising, and because cable is among the last things that struggling households would cancel.

Few readers of this piece, I suspect, would be surprised by what I have written so far. But the point of reviewing the issue now is the next question I put to people. "How much would you pay for a monthly Internet subscription to the New York Times?" The answers range from "name the price" to "why should I pay? I already get it for free." And therein resides the challenge: Americans willing to pay for cable television subscriptions to channels they never watch must be persuaded to subscribe to online versions of the publications they read in print or on the Internet.