Feel-Good Story of the Year

Congress has been hard at work ensuring that Americans get their football coverage. With the NFL Network broadcasting several live NFL and college bowl games this year, a major controversy has arisen. You see, Time-Warner Cable doesn't carry the NFL Network. So if you have Time-Warner Cable you won't have these games broadcast in your homes.* What's a sports fan to do? Why won't somebody do something? Wait a minute, it's a bird... it's a plane... it's Congress!

Congress looked into the NFL’s decision to put games on a network many cable subscribers cannot see during a Senate hearing on Nov. 14. At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, grilled Jeffrey Pash, the NFL’s executive vice president and legal counsel, during a 90-minute hearing on sports programming. It focused on how live games on NFL Network could affect cable and satellite rates and whether the games raise any antitrust issues in connection with the Sports Broadcasting Act. Pash told the committee that systems should not have to charge viewers extra to carry the network on their main tier, while Landel Hobbs, Time Warner’s chief operating officer, told the committee, “The programming is too expensive; the value equation is out of whack.”

*Don't worry. If the NFL team playing is in your market, you can still get it locally on another network. But this doesn't work with college bowl games. Please Congress, stop the madness.

P.S. Time-Warner and NFL come out looking like a couple of big babies. Time-Warner needs something to lure more people into purchasing their worthless sports package and the NFL needs people to actually be able to see their fledgling network in order for it to profit. News flash: It doesn't matter.