Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., is the official Kick Out the Sports legislator of the year. That's because he has helped to solve what appeared to be an intractable problem — getting your locally broadcast NFL games to also appear on your DirecTV satellite system.

When DirecTV in late 2002 trumpeted that it had extended until 2007 its exclusive NFL Sunday Ticket package, which allows customers to see every single NFL game being broadcast, it didn't trumpet one key provision: You really wouldn't see every single NFL game being broadcast. Starting in the 2003 NFL season, if the local CBS, FOX or ABC affiliate in your area is showing a particular game, you have to watch it on your local CBS, FOX or ABC affiliate, not on DirecTV.

If you subscribe to a DirecTV package that includes local channels, no problem — all you have to do is change the channel. If you didn't buy that package, it's a bigger problem, because you have to switch off your satellite and get the game through the time-tested method of hooking up rabbit ears, putting them on top of your set, then having a friend hold onto them and stretch his arm out in the right direction until you get a clear signal.

If you live in the extremely rural area Bart Stupak represents in Congress, you could have the full cast and very special guests of "Friends" holding onto the TV antenna and still not get a signal. Stupak represents Michigan's Upper Peninsula as well as much of rural northern Lower Michigan. DirecTV doesn't offer local channels to subscribers in Stupak's district, in part because "local channels" could mean Duluth, Minn., or Green Bay, Wis. The area has a few of its own TV stations, but the hilly, wooded terrain makes it difficult to pick up their signals. Nearly since its debut, Marquette, Mich.'s WLUC-TV has been dubbed by the locals as "With Luck U C TV." (Thus making U think that this is how Prince got inspired 2 spell song titles 4 his albums.)

The reception problem can be illustrated by using your cell phone. Stupak's district is generally excluded from multi-state calling plans, so as you get deeper in the U.P. woods, your cell phone window will go from "digital roaming" to "analog roaming" to "where in the hell are we?" Most of Stupak's constituents don't have access to cable, which is why they got a satellite in the first place. For that matter, it wasn't that long ago much of the area Stupak serves had no access to indoor plumbing.

What this meant, then, was that DirecTV subscribers in northern Michigan ended up paying about $250 a year for the right not to see their favorite teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions, because they were on "local channels."

Now, most of us would probably never think of alerting our House representative about bad TV reception, but after getting no help from DirecTV, northern Michigan satellite TV viewers called Stupak's office more than 200 times over two weeks, according to the Oct. 6 Munising News. If you think that's way too many calls for such a trivial issue, you've never spent a weekend in Upper Michigan trying to find an activity that has nothing to do with hunting or fishing.

Stupak rushed to action, engaging the NFL and DirecTV in discussions about lifting the "local channels" blackout for his constituency. Here, and I paraphrase, was the crux of his argument:

1. My district is extremely rural, and can't get TV reception.

2. My district is extremely rural, and relies on your satellites to know what's going on in places where it doesn't snow nine months a year.

3. My district is extremely rural, and the local affiliates' advertisers will never miss it.

Problem solved! In mid-September, Stupak got the blackout lifted in the western Upper Peninsula, and by mid-October that blackout had been lifted for much of the rest of his district as well. In fact, DirecTV now has firm policy that you may qualify to receive broadcast feeds of the major networks if you don't live near a metropolitan area, can't get any TV reception whatsoever and live more than 70 miles from TV stations. (By the way, the broadcast feed is not the local channels, but a network feed.) You can even request a waiver of the "local channel" rules through DirecTV and your local TV stations.

It's rare when you have actual, tangible proof that your phone call, letter, e-mail or rock through a window to your Congressperson gets results. For this, we at Kick Out the Sports salute Bart Stupak. Also, we at Kick Out the Sports plan to call our Congressman the next time the cable is out.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.