Very nice Newsday (Long Island paper) credit to Kerry for getting the Oscars back on in our area

[karynnj]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4297766

There were other legislators, inluding Lautenberg, who the HILL wrote of as pushing for this, but Cabelevision in the loop they had where ABC normally was spoke of hundreds of lawmakers, but singled out JK and repeated a quote from him.

Not as important as Afghanistan, the Middle East and healthcare - all of which Kerry contributed positively too - but this is important too.

[karynnj]

1. It looks like there may be follow up on fixing the rules to avoid this

Trying to prevent the kind of brinkmanship that had ABC removing its affiliate station from millions of New York area homes hours before the Oscar broadcast, a group of television providers asked the government Tuesday to revamp the rules governing the retransmission of stations.

In a petition to the Federal Communications Commission and in a letter to Congressional leaders, the providers — including heavyweights like DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Verizon, as well as smaller providers and nonprofit groups — said the current rules were “broken and in need of repair.”

The regulations date to 1992 and ensured that cable providers would carry over-the-air stations. Now that more of those stations are asking to be paid by the providers, the same way that cable-only channels are paid, the cable and satellite industries believe that the rules give the stations far too much leverage.
<snip>

The retransmission rules “have repercussions for what Americans can view and how much they pay for it,” Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote in a letter last week to the F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski. Mr. Kerry, who has been vocal about the cable fee issue, asserted that the current rules were outdated, adding, “we need to fix the system.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/business/media/10cable.html