Artificially Staged with 100% Chance of Demagoguery

It was an unpleasant shock this morning when The Weather Channel – The Weather Channel – broke into its regularly scheduled reporting of, well, “weather,” to take viewers to the Obama signing of the House health care “reform” package.

There is nothing conceivable to make of this programming decision, other than that the TWC executives consider the Obamacare legislation so historic-n-epic that even The Weather Channel, which has no charter to bring viewers such non-weather-related coverage, would be doing its audience a service by getting in on the act.

It’s not like viewers had no other options for watching the ceremony.  Just through my cable service, I get 11 other channels on which the signing ceremony was being broadcast.  Three of them are NBC Universal properties, which TWC is as well, since the 2008 buyout.

Seriously, why was a domestic political signing ceremony being broadcast on The Weather Channel?  I don’t remember that kind of coverage being accorded the political events after 9/11, even though that was arguably a much bigger single episode in America’s national life.  A bill signing ceremony has nothing to do with weather.  Any connection with weather is tenuous to a degree of absurdity – unlike, for example, TWC focusing on how weather was affecting relief efforts in Haiti after the earthquake, or how weather was affecting the post-9/11 recovery and clean-up efforts in Manhattan.  Even weather’s effect on a presidential inauguration establishes a connection that meets the common-sense test.  Weather does affect such activities, as it does big sporting events and military operations overseas.  There’s some “hook” for involving TWC in coverage.

But an indoor signing ceremony in Washington, DC?  We’re not, after all, talking about a segment predicting the weather for the signing ceremony.  We’re talking about running live coverage of it, on a TV channel where such coverage has no purpose conceivably related to the channel’s charter, as understood by the viewers.

There’s a creepy aspect to this, an aura of programming decisionmakers clobbering the infotrons with political coverage from one particular perspective.  Fortunately, NBC is one media outlet among a number of them.  We in the public have the requisite knowledge about its ownership (General Electric holds 80% of NBC Universal) to form judgments about how that might affect its editorial perspective.  We have experience with NBC properties (NBC, MSNBC) to inform us where its news programming executives and senior editors are coming from.  We know that GE has benefited from more than $120 billion in federal bailout money and is positioned to profit from carbon trading under new US laws for which it has been lobbying hard.

So forewarned is forearmed, and all that.  Hallelujah for freedom of speech and the press, and for thinking independently and forming our own judgments.  Yet the sense of a media giant pushing “themes” on viewers gathers steam.  I thought the past week’s commercial blitz with the GE-Reagan Centennial ad was almost miraculously timed to juxtapose in people’s minds their memories of Reagan, and his association with GE, with Obama’s great FDR-ite moment of Progressive political triumph, which the left is playing up for all it’s worth.  I was ready to let the impression of the timing go, but then The Weather Channel interrupted its broadcast for live coverage of the bill signing this morning, and the sense of a media theme blitz became too great to ignore.

Frankly, this TWC programming decision was inappropriately political.  Since I’m bailing out GE, NBC’s parent company, that’s more than an issue of consumer choice.  I’ve already changed the channel, but I shouldn’t have to keep the parent company in operation so it and its subsidiaries can impose wholly-unrelated political themes on weather coverage.

Take back Congress in November.

Cross-posted at Hot Air’s Greenroom.