Buried at the end of this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article is this little gem:
Charter Communications was diligently trying to broadcast the game as part of its cable package and thought it was a done deal until Tuesday, when it received a letter from CBS Corp., owner of the Green Bay station airing the game. CBS said it didn’t have the necessary copyright clearance from the NFL Network to allow Charter to carry the game in the Antigo, Wausau, Stevens Point and Wisconsin Rapids areas, which get the Green Bay CBS station as part of their cable package. (emphasis added)
Let me get this right. Because those cities aren’t “close enough” to Green Bay for the NFL’s taste, they get fucked? Bull-fucking-shit! Let’s review the distances involved as the signal flies, and remember that Charter plucks these signals off the air:
Antigo to Green Bay – 70 miles
Wausau to Green Bay – 86 miles
Stevens Point to Green Bay – 76 miles
Wisconsin Rapids to Green Bay – 90 miles
Granted, they’re on the fringes of the signal from Green Bay for the average person, but Charter manages to pull them off the air with no problem. Let’s take a look at a pair of telling paragraphs from a story on the Green Bay CBS affiliate’s site:
“You could obviously do that, and you could put it on free television,” said (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell, who spoke to reporters at Lambeau Field before the Vikings-Packers game. “But then, how do you ever get the distribution?”
Goodell denied the league was using a high-profile game broadcast — it could be Brett Favre’s last appearance at Lambeau — as a bargaining chip to put public pressure on cable television operators to carry the channel.
What a bunch of fucking bullshit. The league is using high-profile game broadcasts, namely divison rivalries, to put public pressure on cable television operators to cough up $9/subscriber/year to put 8 NFL games and 2 college bowl games on a full basic cable, the asshat commish admits it, and then has the balls to deny he just admitted it.
