Iowa/Iowa State game black out?

You've gone too far, Mediacom, says Richard

By Richard Gilbert

When a big business starts screwing with the Iowa-Iowa State football game on Sept. 11, I can guarantee a bunch of Iowans will be p-ssed off.

I go back in antiquity for this metaphorical quote:

In around 200 BC, the Greek philosopher Bion said: "Although boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest."

That quote describes the head-butting between a cable company serving parts of Iowa and two local tv stations, ABC affiliates, WOI-TV, Ames-Des Moines, and WQAD-TV Moline/Quad Cities. Call them "the boys'.

And you can call their viewers (us) the "frogs."

The "boys" are locked in a dispute over money. The local stations want more from the cable company for the right to retransmit their signals. The cable company is resisting the rate hikes, which ultimately will either eat into its profits or subscribers pay more. And while not precisely sport, there's a goodly amount of gamesmanship going on. It's hard to see if there are good guys/bad guys here or just 'boys' throwing stones in the interests of better bottom lines.

Both stations are currently blacked out on Mediacom, depriving viewers of local news and ABC programming.

The Des Moines Register earlier this week led with a front-page story: "No media deal in sight" in a well-reported piece by Tyler Jett.

The players are both public companies. TEGNA owns the two tv stations as well as 66 others at the latest count. Mediacom claims to be the 5th largest cable company in the country, number one in Iowa, and number two in Illinois. In 2020 total revenue for Mediacom was just shy of $3 billion, while TEGNA's take was just under $2 billion. Almost $500 million of that came from political advertising, just in case you were wondering where the donation to your favorite candidate went last year.

These two companies both have extraordinary influence over what content is available (or not) to local tv viewers (again referred to as the "frogs.")

There are plenty of other large companies dominating the marketplace. But the current loggerhead with TEGNA (WOI-TV and WQAD-TV) vs. Mediacom has Iowans riled up. Thus far, the cable blackout has kept viewers away from the Women's NCAA basketball finals and the Academy Awards Show.

Grey's Anatomy? Nope.

ABC's Game of the Week on Sept. 11 will be the Hawkeyes versus the Cyclones, a clash sure to bring the state to a standstill.

Doing the right thing to serve viewers seems out of the question.

I have some sense of what the folks who run the stations must be going through. I was fortunate enough to have been the president and general manager of WQAD-TV in my early days with The Des Moines Register. The company purchased the station in 1977 and dispatched me to Moline to take on the responsibility.

The Register, at that time, owned just one tv station, and so long as I made my numbers, it was pretty much my call what we determined was in the viewer's interest. What a concept!

If I made a mistake, I heard from viewers and could course correct. For example, a dispute over fees could have been resolved by answering: what is in the viewers' best interest?

Nowadays, with the dangerous concentration of media outlets putting decisions in the hands of folks in distant places, local autonomy isn't even a consideration.

TEGNA became a separate company in June 2015, when the tv stations owned by Gannett split into another corporate entity. Here's another quote from more recent history.

In the news release explaining the changes, the CEO of TEGNA said:

This is a significant step in our ongoing initiatives to increase shareholder value by building scale, increasing cash flow, sharpening management focus, and strengthening our businesses to compete effectively in today's increasingly digital landscape.

Wait! What about the viewers?

Technology now makes it possible to control a station from afar.

But the issue is not with technology concentration. Rather, it is: who ultimately calls the shots in Moline or Ames? There's been considerable controversy over the practice of at least one TV conglomerate mandating pre-packaged news feeds with a very biased political bent to its owned stations (nearly 200). Hopefully, local news directors can still call most of the shots at the station level, but only if they don't overstep the company line.

There may be a Bandaid on how we watch the Iowa-Iowa State game if the two media titans are still throwing stones this fall. I had an interesting call today with the guy who won his spurs as my chief technical leader when I ran WQAD.

He said there are workarounds, some of which are even noted on the websites and recorded messages for the two tv stations. It's not hard to do, and it could spell defections from the cable companies when viewers see how easy it is to cut them out of the picture.

Said my guy, who is still very much a player in the rapidly moving digital world: "If you can operate your iPhone, you can utilize a streaming service. Hulu+ or Youtube can get local stations. Or you can use an alternate service provider such as Dish or Direct TV."

"Worse case," he added, "you can save even more money and be a cord cutter by getting one of the new modern antennas from Best Buy or Target and receive your affiliate's signal directly over the air like most everyone used to do. Many still do."

"if you can't figure it out, your kids or grandkids certainly can," he added.

Referring to the earlier Greek quote about frogs not dying in sport, he assured me: "Your frogs won't have to die this time. They can just hop to a different lily pad. "