‘United Breaks Guitars’ dude sells out to rabbit-eared lobbyists

The television temple at 299 Queen Street West today exhumed any last fumes from its renegade Citytv days by hosting a news conference for Local TV Matters: building owner CTV were joined by Global and CBC executives to get their message out in advance of hearings about whether cable companies should be dinged dollars for old-fashioned over-the-air signals. The pipeline providers have mounted their own letter-writing campaign, Stop The TV Tax. But now the networks have a theme song! Dave Carroll, the Halifax troubadour who stuck it to the man from United Airlines with his ditty about how they broke his guitar — viewed 5.7 million times — was commissioned to write another piece of irritainment. Them broadcast managers might be big city slickers but Carroll’s music plays straight to the Canadian heartland: “There’s big news from London to Rome/The matters that matter at Rome/Are getting swept away with cuts and budgets blown/Our culture’s on the highest table/Without help it’s bound to fall/And though they’re able cable won’t play ball.” Good to know an artist who struck viral paydirt by complaining about an American corporation to the delight of American web viewers — without depending on a mid-20th century infrastructure to foist his message on the public — has got his priorities straight: the coalition surely compensated him well for this one. At the forefront of promoting Local TV Matters on actual television in the form of pseudo-news is CTV-owned CP24, which last year had an operating profit of 31.5 per cent, thanks to every home that receives the low-budget all-news channel paying 30 cents a month buried in their bill, effectively doing the dirty work for their corporate associates in Agincourt. Meanwhile, consider that CHCH in Hamilton — brought to the brink of a blackout earlier this year by Canwest — are eschewed the idea of buying American shows to fill the hours between newscast shifts, with new owners opting to keep the anchor desk active all morning and afternoon, are conspicuously keeping a distance from all this bickering.