Posted on 11/07/2012 11:25:30 PM PST by Steelers6
I’d like to give a nudge today to everyone out there to do something that I did back in 2009 and have never regretted since: cancel your cable TV service and stop your newspaper delivery.
If enough people did this, it would decimate the Democrats’ most powerful propaganda tools: the Comcast-owned networks of NBC and MSNBC, CNN, and the other dinosaur media outlets that comprise the Left’s Ministry of Truth (Minitrue, for short) that serves Barack Obama with cultish devotion.
Since you can’t just cancel MSNBC and NBC or CNN, you’ll need to cancel your cable TV service altogether. This would be quite a life adjustment for a lot of people, so if it’s something you need to think about and consult other affected family members about then please do that. But just having the conversation about making this change is a step in the right direction. Let me tell you that three years ago when I did this I didn’t think I could live without cable TV. I grew up in inner city Cleveland in the 80s and 90s when cable service wasn’t even offered to anyone living downtown…you could only get it out in the suburbs. Whenever we’d visit relatives in the ‘burbs I’d greedily soak up as much MTV or Nickelodeon as I could and would marvel at all the movies and other things on what seemed like unlimited channels. This was, of course, before the Internet, streaming movies, and all the other ways to access content in the year 2012. Back in Cleveland in those days, I just had my books, VHS cassettes we owned, and whatever the six channels that were available via broadcast antenna decided to show.
Cable came to downtown Cleveland around the same time I went away to college and I paid for Comcast subscriptions in every apartment I ever had as an adult from that point forward…until 2009 when my good friend Abbey back in Ohio asked me if I wanted to do something life-changing with her. Abbey is a dynamo and every once in a while sets out to eliminate something caustic from her life…and she set about removing TV as an influencer because she didn’t like some of the bad habits her little son Remy was picking up from what she called “the idiot box”. This all came to a head when lil’ Remy saw someone smack another person on TV and call that person a bad word and then later Remy did the same thing to Abbey…and she decided she had about all she was going to take of this.
Her call to me asked if I wanted to join her in this and see if I could do it too, because together the two of us were always trying to think of new ways to save time and money and balance household budgets. In 2009 I was single and working a lot of crazy hours as a freelancer and consultant in Chicago and was rarely home, so I sat down and calculated what I was spending on TV at home and it was outrageous considering the amount of time I actually watched it. I had stopped watching MSNBC and CNN completely during the 2008 elections because they were clearly part of Minitrue…but had also stopped watching FOX, too, because while it’s much less skewed to the Left than the other “news networks”, it still has a lot of pro-Democrat bias to it (honestly…sit and watch it…and you’ll see this if you look for it; FOX is not the enemy of the Left that Minitrue always claims it is).
For a while after cutting the cable, I missed networks like BRAVO and LOGO and the stupid stuff I used to watch whenever I was home. The first three weeks after canceling Comcast I felt strange and lost. It was like when I had to give up all caffeine for a while because it interfered with a prescription I needed for some health issues…and my body rebelled against losing this thing it was used to. I remember it being so dead quiet in the house because the “idiot boxes” that I had in the living room, kitchen, and bedroom were all dead, dusty surfaces now. That was remedied by dragging those TVs one by one down to a local electronics store that bought them off me. The timing was great because this was around when I would have needed special gizmos to convert these older sets into the new digital receivers or whatever that had just come out that year. I never had to bother with any of that since I sold the sets and netted a couple hundred bucks for unloading the dead weight.
In the years since I unhooked from cable, I’ve actually managed to see everything I want by just being a little creative and using the Internet as my sole content-provider. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything, and I certainly don’t miss the old $160/month cable bill. This is how Justin and I watch everything that matters to us without cable TV:
* Hulu.com — subscription is $8/month and it has most of the TV shows I like to watch and would have been recording on TIVO back when I had a TV
* Netflix.com — online subscription is $8/month and replaces the need to flip through channels watching movies that might be on
* Amazon Instant Video — has movies for $3 each (sometimes just $1 on weekends!) that have just come out on DVD…which is like renting a movie back when there were video stores. We probably watch between one to three movies like this a month instead of going to movie theaters (something Justin never liked to do and I have to admit I am not comfortable doing in a big city like Chicago since the Dark Knight Rises shootings)
* EW.com and TelevisionWithoutPity.com — for the rare instances where something is on a network like HBO that doesn’t release content to Amazon Instant Video the next day after it airs, I just read the recap of the episode online and get the gist of what happened. This applies to shows like True Blood that don’t come on Amazon until a year after they aired on HBO, right before the new season starts in the summer. Dexter on Showtime is like this too. Honestly, though, reading the recaps is enough for me because it’s like reading a book and then next year the “movie” comes out and I can see it acted out on the screen. I need to keep up with a lot of shows because I feel pressure to know what’s happening in pop culture…and reading a recap takes me about 15 minutes instead of an hour to watch something.
* TheMovieSpoiler.com — this is a great site that posts spoilers of all the movies out in theaters. Usually, they have write-ups the day something opens. I read what happens in all the movies that come out but now almost never go to see any in actual theaters. The only time that Justin and I will go to a show is if I snag free tickets through my friends in marketing here in Chicago or if I win them in some of the little contests I always see on entertainment sites and enter. This way I know what happens in the movies months before they come out on Netflix or Amazon streaming.
* Free TV Project — be careful with this one, but it’s the last resort effort if I REALLY need to see something immediately and can’t find it anywhere else and it’s something I am not satisfied just reading a recap for. This is a site that has links to various streams where you can watch something like True Blood almost as soon as it airs. The only thing is, you should never use it with a PC. I think this is where I’ve caught some viruses on PCs…but it works fine with a Mac. You just look up the show you want and then try to find a reliable stream to watch the episode online. I very rarely do this since I’m afraid of ruining my computer…but it is there as a last resort if I feel like I will just go nuts if I can’t see something important that was on HBO and I don’t want to wait a year to watch it when it comes out on Amazon streaming.
I honestly see no need for a newspaper subscription because I get all my news online. Occasionally, the Chicago Tribune gets delivered to us for some reason and will pile up on our doorstep when someone in the building moves out or an address is read wrong by a paperboy and suddenly the newspaper is there in the morning. Justin and I look at these things like they are messages in bottles flung at us from far into the past. They are gross to touch and leave sticky ink on my hands and the propaganda in them is so strong I can’t read more than a few articles into them without laughing at the North Korea/Saddam’s Iraq depths that Minitrue sinks in trying to rewrite history and current events to best suit Democrats.
Honestly, if you are paying to have lies delivered to your door every morning please stop it. Let the Left subsidize their own propaganda and don’t contribute to it. I’d love to see all daily papers go out of business coast to coast and would enjoy the irony that the party who supposedly worships our environment is the one that wastes forests of trees every year churning out rank propaganda that’s flopped onto people’s doorsteps.
I know getting a newspaper every day is a generational thing and that people 40 and older have made this a part of their lives for decades. But, cable TV was a big part of my life too…and I saw quickly that I was able to live without it. I am so happy I followed Abbey’s lead and cut the cable…and love that I saved a small fortune these last three years (which has really come in handy paying for the servers and other costs of running this site). In a way, the money I would have spent helping to fund the Left’s Ministry of Truth ended up going into efforts here at HillBuzz where I try to counter that propaganda on a daily basis…which was a better use for that cash in my life.
I’m sure you can find better uses for what you spend on cable TV and newspapers in your own lives, too. Canceling your magazine subscriptions is smart as well. Unless it’s a reliably conservative publication that provides no propaganda service to you, just stop paying for it. I’m someone who happens to love Vanity Fair even though it’s degenerated into nonstop Leftist propaganda but I refuse to pay for it anymore…so I just go to the library near the end of the month and spend an afternoon there reading the issues I would have had delivered to me. Since I skip anything that’s pro-Obama or Minitrue-approved, it doesn’t take long to read the articles I really enjoy. A lot of them are available for free online too.
Please think about the little, hidden ways you help Democrats every day by funding the things that help keep them in power. MSNBC is actually very close to financial collapse right now and many newspapers are about to go under. A nice nudge by conservatives who are sick of Minitrue shoving Democrats’ talking points at us via these corrupt, vintage media outlets could decimate large numbers of the propagandists the Left depends on to win the culture wars in this country. For instance, just imagine if everyone who considers themselves a Tea Party American would just cancel their cable and newspaper subscriptions and instead follow news via reliable online conservative outlets. It would be Doomsday for Minitrue in a matter of months.
Think about it.
Talk about it with your families.
Sit down and be amazed by your annual savings if you really did decide to cut your cable TV and eliminate newspaper delivery.
And if you do so, please tell the person you speak with to do this WHY you are canceling. Tell them that you got sick of the Ministry of Truth pumping out nonstop pro-Obama and pro-Democrat propaganda and you decided enough was enough.
They will get the message, trust me.
But since Minitrue has lost all credibility with most people I think it will have already been too late.
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PS: If you know of other ways that people can see shows they want to watch if they don’t have TV, please chime in below in comments with those. I know there are other options besides Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, etc. but I’ve never used those and would like to know how you see things online without a cable subscription.
This household is gettin' 'er done. Nothing on anyway in all the 250 channels I pay for. I can rent a movie for a buck, lol.
As far as the news channels, what news channels? All propaganda.
I believe that is what my wife intends to say when she calls her tomorrow with the news. It would be the truth regardless of whether the lady was or was not an Obama supporter. My wife, who is usually not one to penny pinch, has decided she wants to reduce all non-essential costs.
I recommend this too - been doing it for years.
I use Amazon Prime for movies and TV if I want some. It’s like netflix, 7.99, except it also gives you some pretty decent deals on non-movie stuff you might buy on Amazon (computer monitors etc ... that kind of non-movie stuff), you automatically get free 2 day shipping on almost anything.
I can’t vouch for this because I haven’t used netflix for years ... but one difference at Amazon is that a ton of movies and series are free (if you have the 7.99 Amazon Prime), and then some you pay for. At first this may seem bad, however, given that the streaming market has gotten to saturation point, I believe that all it does is give you the option, if you want, to watch higher quality moves and series earlier ... so if you want to pay for a really popular/recent series ... you can.
But there is still plenty of content without paying extra.
If anyone has good recent comparisons of netflix/hulu/amazon/others ... let ‘er rip. As Mitt says “I like that I can fire people.”
Highly recommend getting off all MSM ... and then checking in with it once a week at a friends house or something, just so you know what slop the MSM is feeding the farm animals that week.
With any luck OTHER people this lady has as clients will also no longer be needing her “services.” Votes have consequences. And she voted (possibly multiple times) .
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The sad part is she could lose EVERY gig she has, you could sit her down and talk to her and explain the facts of life until you are either blue in the face or a certain part of your body seals shut and she still won’t understand.
THAT is how dumbed down the people have become.
Remember ‘way back when’ Congress passed the law etc that the bank would have to process your pay check immediately (or sooner) and the people ‘roared with approval’ that those nasty banks would finally get theirs.
Then, when they had to move paper swiftly to process YOUR pay check they were able to process checks you wrote.
So, the good old days of mailing a check on Tues have the (whoever) receive it on Thurs and not be processed till Monday were gone....quick as they get it, it is posted and out of your account....
SO be very careful for what you wish for, there is also a flip side that will pretty much bite you in the arse.
I agree with ditching Fox News. I quit various Fox News shows before and am really ending my time with the network. My top favorite radio guys I listen too the most are: 1. Glenn Beck and The Blaze 2. Mark Levin 3. Dana Leosch out of Saint Louis on KFTK over the web. 4. Rusty Humphries and the Tea Party News Network 5. Rush Limbaugh 6. Michael Savage
I also read conservative sites like FR, Daily Caller, The Blaze, World Net Daily, American Spectator, and so on.
I started most my things a few years ago and doubled down after the primaries.
I am no longer listening and watching to much of what I did ten years ago.
Amazon and Netflix are publicly traded, not sure about Hulu.
I have cable just to watch certain shows like on Me-TV, Antenna TV, TMC and AMC. I also watch History channel and biography channel. But I stopped watching various channels. I need entertainment away from just news. I use youtube and Hulu a lot.
Hulu ownership:
NBCUniversal Television Group (32%)
Fox Broadcasting Company (31%)
Disney-ABC Television Group (27%)
Providence Equity Partners (10%)
Hm, looks like a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Can someone tell me how to get internet without going through AT&T or Comcast. I assume I have to have a phone line. I’ve checked that out and it’s more expensive than my cable that gets me internet and a phone.
Fox is still great. The only gave full coverage of “fast&furious”
I don’t know. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper since the 80’s and only pick up a rag when I am away from the net for sports news. I have DirectTV and only watch TCM. Quit FOX about year ago. Need my TCM fix though....
TOSS OUT YOUR TV!!
Take the plunge, j, it's doable!
I gave up Fox during Katrina. The histrionics from Shep and Geraldo did it for me. I was probably down to only watching them for breaking news anyway. And from time to time I tune them in for that, but, with TV stations doing so much live streaming, and radioreference.com, it is rare.
I wanted to get through the elections, so I think we will be turning off satellite shortly. I love watching Nascar and other sports in HD, so that I will miss. But, we have made that transition to Netflix, Amazon video, and Hulu. I am buying a nice AM radio where I can tune into Rockies & Broncos, and I can subscribe to Nascar radio, so that should cover my sports loves.
I wouldn’t call them libs’ biggest propaganda tools. There are the schools, which we were packed into for multiple hours a day. I realize some people watch a lot of tv, but not that much, and certainly not all of it news or otherwise ideologically flavored fare.
Already there!
YouTube and Hulu for documentaries and science shows.
BitTorrent for the occasional movie/TV show that I wont be paying some Hollywood socialist to watch.
No, 5-10 years ago was the time for that.
I completely understand what you are getting at in regards to who “owns” Hulu, netflix, and Amazon. But, here are a couple of points.
Why didn’t “conservative” entrepreneurs beat them to the punch? And, how do you connect to the internet? Are you paying a subscription to some company for telephone or cable? Those companies are just as responsible as any other liberal companies. I hate to break it to you, but there are not many major corporations anymore that do not support liberal causes in some fashion.
But, by only paying Netflix $8 a month, Amazon $80 a year, and Hulu is something like $10 a month, I have reduce the money I send to these groups by 75%. If a comparable alternative comes onto the Horizon, I will jump on it.
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