Fee for carriage web war waged to win over rocking chairs

The social media experts running the Twitter feed for the Stop the TV Tax campaign really want to be your friend! That is, so long as you don’t wonder why the cable and satellite providers behind the lobby don’t pay the threatened additional charge for over-the-air stations out of their own deep pockets, drawing a defensive reaction that rabbit ears still deliver those signals for free. Otherwise, it’s a whole lot of high-fives for anyone who takes up the cause of companies they send money to without reservation each month — what they really, really want, though, is you to send a form email to Ottawa. This alliance of competitors Bell and Rogers, plus other companies across the land, have produced a fake-streeter spot where broadcasters are described by one possibly pregnant woman as “really selfish and kind of sneaky.” Kind of like implying that women young enough to get pregnant are still relying on homegrown TV to tell them what they want to know. But no self-respecting broadcaster waiting for a bailout is going to run those, especially not the CBC with their stubborn belief in competing with CTV and Global for the local suppertime news audience, collectively represented by the lobby effort Local TV Matters. But their respective countdown clocks are set to two different public hearing deadlines: November 16 is when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will hear the arguments of “local” owners to squeeze out extra bucks, while the cable companies get their turn December 7. Stop the TV Tax have augmented their doomsday clock with an alarmist fact sheet — they’ve somehow done better numbers so far with the Facebook fan page than the Twitter feed, but aren’t people even casually plugged into social media the least likely to care about subsidizing the hairspray budget for their friendly neighbourhood anchorman? Caught in the middle is Rogers-owned Citytv, which would presumably not turn down their chunk of the “up to $5-10 a month” passed along to customers nationwide — level playing field and all that. Then again, numbers for their heavily-invested late news lead-in, The Jay Leno Show, aren’t looking so good.