American Rot:

American Rot is a condition that I find to be rampant in America today. I am going to give you an illustration that will perhaps help you to understand not only how the problem happens but also a method of identifying this condition. I hope my example is understandable. The example I am going to use is broadcast TV and the switch from analog to digital.

I live south of Houston, Texas on the Gulf Coast. The signal must travel through the air some 37 miles from Missouri City tower farm to my antenna. For the past 40 plus years this has been happening without flaw even during hurricanes and other natural disasters. I have however now experienced a prolonged outage of two of the four major TV stations. After the highly touted switch over to DTV on June 12th things started downhill. At first rescanning seemed to solve most of the problems. The PBS affiliated station announced that they had to leave the air for 13 days to make modifications to their antenna. This was understandable due to their lack of funds. PBS is the least funded of the VHF networks. Without announcement ABC next vanished from my screen soon to be followed by CBS. All the while NBC signal continued to be working perfectly. The higher frequency channels like FOX also continued to broadcast uninterrupted. These channels used the frequencies above channel 13.

For more on VHF vs. UHF click here.


Where the irritant comes is that all the while my signal was not present ABC and CBS continued to be available via cable. That is to say revenues continued to flow into ABC and CBS and they seem to care less about folks that did not contribute to this revenue stream except by viewing advertisements. The fact that I was without service that used the airwaves that belong to me as a citizen of America was blithely ignored, this during the worst financial crisis since 1929. News is not going to make a huge difference to my moral which is admittedly low. However when I cannot see exactly how other parts of America is weathering the storm and what measures are helping or hindering them I feel deprived.

There has been an ongoing erosion of news sources available to the American public. An uninformed public is something I think no American wants. The news paper continues to be delivered. But effectively two thirds of my major TV news stations are no longer casting images to my living room screen. Am I alarmed? You bet I am.

Things like this happen when the decision makers are insulated from suffering the consequences of their actions. Due to the revenue stream from cable TV the broadcasting stations could afford to interrupt the signal to my house and no matter how loudly I ranted they could safely ignore me. In fact they are still ignoring me except for FOX and NBC and a smattering of Spanish speaking channels. I suspect this same logic applies to other problems in America. Health care will not be fixed so long as congress has their own program that is I understand very good and covers you for life even if you only served in congress for 2 years. We saw this with investment banks on Wall Street where golden parachutes insulated upper management from the loss of retirement as their company smashed on the rocks of financial mismanagement. Wake up America. We are getting the shaft and they are getting the mine.