Congressman Ben Cline, a regular guest on the right0wing Newsmax channel, thinks those of us who live in his congressional district are “furious” that they can’t watch it on DirecTV anymore.
He said so during an interview on, um, Newsmax:
“My constituents are furious because they rely on Newsmax for information that cuts through all the woke rhetoric to actually provide people in the Shenandoah and Roanoke valleys with facts and not a spin in a liberal direction. So, they’re so upset at losing [Newsmax], they’ve been calling my office.”
Despite the best efforts of Cline and others to turn this into a case of liberal censorship of conservative viewpoints, DirecTV’s decision to drop Newsmax was an economic one, a function of the free market that Cline purports to revere.
In a statement, DirecTV said it wanted to “continue to offer the network,” but the channel’s demands for carriage fee increases would have led to “significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base.”
Newsmax wanted more money from DirecTV, and DirecTV didn’t want to pay it. So they dropped it. Capitalism in action.
While I have no doubt that some people in the Sixth District are angry, and have contacted Cline’s office, I would be curious to know exactly how many– compared, say, to the number who have contacted him to support reproductive rights or gun violence prevention measures, or to denounce his votes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, or to urge him to protect Social Security and Medicare from cuts…
Strangely he has never discussed these contacts.
My guess is that only a very small percentage of Cline’s constituents are devoted, furious viewers of Newsmax. But of course those are the ones to whom he thinks he needs to pay attention.
Gene Zitver is the editor of ClineWatch.
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Chris Graham
