Cable caves, and we pay

BUCKLING TO PRESSURE FROM Washington, leading cable TV companies agreed this week to limit the amount of crude, suggestive and violent programming beamed into their customers’ homes. Although their decision puts an end, at least for the time being, to talk of government censorship, their approach fails to give consumers real control over their TVs. By creating a so-called family tier of channels, cable operators are taking a problematic half step.

Lawmakers, regulators and conservative Christian groups have complained loudly that cable programming is rife with sex and profanity. Last month, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin told a Senate committee that if cable operators did not give subscribers more ways to avoid objectionable channels, lawmakers should impose the same decency standards on pay TV that they’ve placed on broadcast networks. In response, the nation’s two largest cable operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and four others said they would soon offer subscribers a new tier of channels suitable for family viewing.

The move cut the legs out from under the drive to impose decency standards on pay TV, and that’s a good thing. Putting government censors onto networks such as FX and Comedy Central, which people can’t watch unless they pay for cable service, flies in the face of the 1st Amendment. But cable operators aren’t really empowering customers to control what comes into their homes. If they want to do that, they would offer individual networks on an a la carte basis, not just inflexible bundles of channels.

Unfortunately for viewers, cable and satellite operators have little incentive to go the a la carte route. The entertainment conglomerates supplying most of the programming insist that their less-popular networks be bundled with more popular ones. The major cable operators own cable networks, too, which they want to beam into as many homes as possible for the sake of advertising revenue. These groups argue that paying for, say, eight channels on an a la carte basis would cost subscribers more than getting a package of 60 channels. Of course, most subscribers never watch most of them.

Even if they wanted to offer channels a la carte, cable industry officials say their long-term contracts with networks bar such an approach, at least in the near term. Those contracts also make it difficult to assemble an attractive family tier.

The cable companies are now grappling with thorny questions about just what qualifies as family friendly programming. Does it include shows about cooking? Sports? Nature programs that show lions eating gazelles for breakfast? And what about the Cartoon Network, which offers kids shows during the day but mature fare at night?

All of these questions raise the more obvious one: Wouldn’t it be easier just to let viewers choose for themselves?