Imagine my shock getting the email that baseball was canceled, and by one of those judgy, fascist tech companies Elon Musk warned us about! That’s right, libs: YouTube, and therefore its parent company Google and therefore its parent company Alphabet, have canceled baseball just like DirecTV has canceled all conservative broadcasting in the world by dropping its carriage agreement with Newsmax. Get outraged because you’ll never be able to see baseball–and maybe any sport–ever again if Google decides you can’t! (… except for the networks YouTube TV’s email lists as carrying Major League Baseball games.)
Of course Google isn’t canceling baseball. YouTube TV has stopped carrying MLB TV because they haven’t reached an agreement on carriage fees, the money networks charge providers and bundlers to carry their programming. It’s something that happens all the time: cable television and satellite providers regularly juggle their lineups because they renegotiate with the networks and drop ones that don’t merit the bandwidth. In some cases, a crappy channel broadcasting nothing but Andy Griffith shows (whose content is free) becomes more economical for the carrier than a more popular network that charges for content. Newsmax just learned that. Newsmax wanted to charge DirecTV carriage fees for the first time–Newsmax preferred the free distribution rather than getting programming money but now needs the money thanks to, ironically, its programming–and DirecTV said no.
But when you mix perpetual rage with abject ignorance, you get… well, Lauren Boebert. The failed restauranteur from Rifle took to the floor of the House Tuesday to state that DirecTV was “canceling” and “censoring” conservatives because it will no longer carry conservative propaganda network Newsmax. In fact, Lauren said invoking the slippery slope fallacy, how do we know this isn’t the first step to removing Fox from all TeeVee sets. Or how do we know they won’t drop the History Channel–which doesn’t cover much actual history anymore unless you consider “The Curse of Oak Island” history–if the network refuses to air the history libruls want you to hear? The loquacious wannabe Suziebee Ant’ny of her day thinks it won’t stop there: dastardly libruls will cancel the Weather Channel for not depicting climate change. (Okay, weather is a product of climate, so the Weather Channel showing the real weather would actually be reporting on the impact of climate change, but…. These are literally the arguments she makes.)
No, Lauren, it’s not censorship. It’s not the top of a slippery slope. It doesn’t make economic sense for the carrier to keep this relationship because Newsmax doesn’t attract enough of a revenue-generating audience to justify the carriage costs it wanted. That’s not censorship; that’s the free market Ted Cruz praises. It’s business. Maybe take a class. You’re obviously not very good at it.