Cable Has Short-Changed Viewers

We let National Cable Month slip by without some sort of celebration. How could we commemorate what cable has done for us? Maybe by going into the kitchen and pouring money down the drain.

Many of the 54 million American homes that get cable TV pay more for it than it’s worth. Cable rates have far outpaced inflation since 1984, when cable was freed by Congress of almost all regulations and when local governments were deprived of the ability to impose limits on cable rates in their communities.

This summer, as it did last year, Congress will attempt to come up with a new cable bill to protect consumers from gouging. But cable is such a powerful lobby now that it can dictate how much regulation it will accept, and it doesn’t seem to want to accept any.

Last year, the cable lobby shot down a reform bill at the last minute. But Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and others in the House and Senate, say they will try again.

One thing the cable people like even less than regulation is competition, and no matter that competition is as American as apple pie. The mere thought of having to face a competitor who might offer better service and lower fees absolutely terrifies cable operators. And yet many communications experts think the only way cable systems will improve is if they are challenged by competitors in the marketplace.

At present, most cable systems are monopolies. You either buy cable from them, or you don’t get cable. The cable industry does all it can to snuff out competition wherever it might appear.

Who could afford to set up a second cable system in your town? The telephone companies, or telcos, already have wires up, and they are itching to get into the business. The White House has let it be known that it thinks letting the telcos in is a good idea.

But the cable industry is adamantly, wildly, rabidly opposed.

The National Cable Television Assn. (NCTA), monster lobbyist for the industry, recently issued a preemptive strike, a 44-page report called “The Never-Ending Story: Telephone Company Anti-Competitive Behavior Since the Breakup of AT&T.;”

It’ll never knock Kitty Kelley off the best-seller lists with a title like that, but the NCTA is making sure that opinion makers and lawmakers get copies. And here’s the joke: The cable industry in its anti-competitive hysteria is accusing the phone companies of being anti-competitive.

Seldom has there been a pot so shameless about calling a kettle black.

Cable has, indeed, changed the way Americans watch and use television. CNN, the all-news channel, and C-SPAN I and II, the public-affairs channels, are not only valuable assets to a viewer, they are enhancements to a democracy. It is hard now to imagine life without them.

And though life would indeed go on without the Weather Channel and its 24-hour forecasts, or American Movie Classics and its trove of old films, channels like these do seem savory additions to the viewing menu.

But mostly, the record of cable is sorry and squalid. What do we have with cable that we didn’t have before? Such wonders as uncut R-rated movies drippy with gore, sex and four-letter words; and, on Ted Turner’s TNT and TBS and some other cable networks, commercial breaks up to five minutes in length, so long you forget what program you are watching.

The cable industry is now spending millions of dollars on a public-relations effort to improve cable’s image. It’s a typical American corporate solution to a pesky problem; work on the perception instead of the performance. If they can make us think warm and cozy thoughts about cable, then maybe we won’t notice how lousy and overpriced it is.