One empire, of course, is Time Warner. The perniciousness of cable monopoly is something familiar to media consumers everywhere. Cable companies are the folks who, knowing they have you over a barrel, won’t let you choose to add individual channels a la carte. If you want, say, ESPN, you need to take–and pay extortionate rates for–10 or 15 other channels, too. All sorts of communities experience this problem.
But there’s a more specifically local dimension to tonight’s story, for the absence of the debate on Berkshire screens also encapsulates (even if it is not caused by) the periphery’s political distance from life in the imperial metropole. People in the Berkshires sometimes speak, humorously (?), about seceding and joining Vermont, pointing out that our county (at least its northern area) can feel more culturally a part of the Green Mountain State than of Massachusetts. We don’t always feel that Beacon Hill offers much of a view of our terrain, either: if you’re a Bostonian and you’re mad about how your tax dollars were wasted on the overruns for the Big Dig, you should hear how people talk about that here. (This is one reason why Deval Patrick does so well in these parts: “outsider” is very much the right label to have in a place where citizens feel that insiders give them short shrift.) So it seems only fitting that as the contenders for the role of Governor battle it out, one county’s worth of citizens will have no idea what the candidates are saying. I look forward to reading the coverage: fortunately, we still get newspapers out here.
You are really culturally out of the Boston orbit, particularly with all the arts-tourism traffic from NYC in the summer. (The area’s been a summer-home destination for New Yorkers fleeing cholera, etc., for centuries.) It’s hard to blame the cable service if they only have room to give you one Fox station — it’s also unfortunate that the Massachusetts version of C-SPAN is Channel 44, the backup station for PBS-Boston, WGBH. We don’t even get that in the Valley.
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There isn’t a Springfield station picking it up? Like those civic minded Sinclair people at Channel 40?
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At least you have better delis than we do inside that Boston orbit…
Gillibrand’s House campaign in NY. It’s closer to us than Beacon Hill is, and it’s where the ads and the news come from. No wonder there are so many Yankee fans in the Berkshires.
The debate will be carried on WGBY 57 in the Springfield area
I went to the local Community Center in Great Barrington to watch it with some friends, and it failed to appear on the local Time-Warner lineup. I shoulda stayed home to watch it on-line!
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There are a few clips and a nice poll on the Fox site.
Here,
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according to Michael Wilcox.
In the end, the debate was shown here only on a high-end digital channel from WGBY. If you didn’t get that–and I’d bet few people do–you were shut out. Not much luck getting that web streaming to work, either. Such is political life in the Berkshires.
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The BMG live blog was thus much appreciated. And in our household, at least, we enjoyed the clips shown on NECN’s 9:00 p.m. coverage. Deval seemed unflappable, sensible, appealing–very gubernatorial. Watching Kerry Healey try to levitate out of her seat whenever Christy lit into her was almost as amusing as C’s new ad. Boy is the Republican establishment going to rue the day that they forced that guy out of the Turnpike Authority…
Jimmy Tingle coined a new word last night, calling Deval the most Governorish. đŸ˜› I too think he was.