If you started your own business, which happened to be providing music, news and comedy for paying customers, why would the federal government have any say over the content you included?  If you were writing a book, should you have to include a heroic Native American character as per Uncle Sam?  If you made a movie, should you have to make it tell a story set in the US where an Italian immigrant did something nice?  What kind of shit is that!?  Today the FCC approved the Sirius/XM merger, but with a few conditions.

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 in favor of a proposal that would allow the deal to proceed as long as the companies meet a series of consumer protection conditions, including a three-year cap on prices, set-aside of channels for minority and non-commercial programming and payment of a $19.7 million penalty for past FCC rule violations. Source.

Now, who do you think knows what their customers want:  the satellite radio companies themselves or the massive bureaucracy of the FCC?  Sirius alone was already offering channels for kids, women, gays, lesbians, and various religious content.

A quick Google shows that out of the the total population of the US, 20% of us aren’t white and 7% of us have satellite radio.  Based solely on those numbers, that means that satellite radio already has over 4 million minority customers, amongst which I count myself.  If we weren’t getting suitable programming, do you really think we’d be shelling out $12 a month for it?

My favorite color is blue.  At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before the federal government begins to mandate that in a given office building the color of paint on the walls must be divided equally between the 7 hues of the visible spectrum to support diversity because we are too stupid to choose a color of paint for ourselves.

Apparently all of us in America need the federal government to step in and mandate that a company offer a specific amount of programming to one type of person or another.  Apparently we minorities are too dumb to choose what entertainment services to purchase, what radio stations to listen to and what content to be entertained by.  If we let the federal government and agencies like the FCC continue to destroy the free market, maybe we are as dumb as they think we are.  Legislation like this is an insult to everybody involved in these companies from the top down.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Music, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.