Keeping Cable Diverse

[SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, AUTHOR: Rep Loretta Sanchez (D-CA)]
[Commentary] Imagine a world where the government decreed newspapers out of existence and required, instead, that you buy your news stories from individual reporters. Hard to contemplate such an Orwellian norm in modern-day commerce? Well, perhaps not. If the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and special interests get their way, a similar heavy-handed government rule, known as a la carte regulations, would apply to the cable television industry. Under the guise of giving parents the right to decide on "family-friendly" programming, that rule would require consumers to pay a charge for every cable television channel they watch. But by imposing a new pay-per channel government regulation -- unprecedented in the annals of government regulation of television content -- the feds would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, killing small programmers and dousing consumers with rate-increases. The FCC should abandon a la carte regulations and instead let the cable industry model continue to give audiences the reasonably priced, diverse programming they seek.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/16/EDGK6G8VHQ1.DTL