Cable-Only Presidential Debates are the New Poll Tax

[Commentary] The Fox News debate marked the moment when politics became indistinguishable from sport in more than just entertainment value. Just as we can’t watch most sporting events (including large swathes of the Olympics) without a cable or satellite subscription, Americans couldn’t watch the debate online unless they were part of the cable/satellite ecosystem.

The thing is that Fox News Channel owes its existence  --  completely  --  to a federal statutory regime aimed at supporting the “public trustee” role of traditional TV broadcasters. And yet all the “public-ness” of that deal has been washed away: Fox News felt no need to ensure that online viewers could watch the debate. That meant that cord-cutters and cord-nevers -- basically, Millennials and an ever-increasing chunk of Americans  --  whose high-speed Internet access wasn’t sold to them by a cable company had to wait for re-runs. The linear  --  traditional  --  model of TV is crumbling, slowly, as more people find programming they’re happy with online. But sports programming remains the Gibraltar of the pay TV bundle: the bedrock, the real-time, must-have stuff that Americans will still pay for. And so pay TV executives, looking to smooth the obvious glide path sloping towards the irrelevance of thick bundles of TV-plus-data just long enough so their retirements will be secure and well-funded, want to turn new categories of programming into sports. Presto: debates become sports, unavailable in livestream form to anyone who doesn’t have a cable or satellite subscription. This is a bad idea. It’s insulting to the thicket of public values that gave this industry life in the first place. It’s wrong. And it shouldn’t happen again in this presidential season. Surely some pay TV guy or gal, somewhere, knows in his or her flinty, close-to-retirement heart of hearts that this practice must not continue. Let’s hope.

[Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at Harvard Law School and a Professor at Cardozo Law School]