LA City Votes For Municipal Fiber Network

An anonymous reader writes "On Saturday, Lafayette, Louisiana voters gave BellSouth and Cox the collective finger and approved a municipal FTTH network by a 62% to 38% margin. The Daily Advertiser has coverage of the vote and possible repercussions. The hotly-contested vote was prompted by a lawsuit by BellSouth and Cox Communications, who bitterly opposed the plan. BellSouth threatened to close a Cingular call center if the plan passed, and the companies employed push polling, including statements that a city-run cable system might ration TV programming and block religious channels."

Comments

Re:Religious channels

[Akai]

It's a big bit of puffed smoke.

The seperation of church and state is not the exclustion of all religion from the public space, it is the avoidance of sponsoring or establishng a state religion.

In you public grounds example, if a local government were to allow a christian group to hold a christmas pagent, then they legally would be oblidged to allow the local pagans to celebrate the soltice on the same or comparable grounds.

For TV, that's another thing, because religion on TV is a private enterprise function, not a government function. A municiple cable company most likely would be governed by the same FCC statutes that corporate cable companies must follow. These statutes include a provision called "must carry" which allows any TV Station over a certain signal strengh to request and recieve carriage on the cable network.

For non-broadcast cable relgious stations, that would be a business, as opposed to a legal decision I think. The Click Network is Tacoma, Washington's municiple network, run by the city-owned power company. A quick perusal of their cabler offering includes many local channels, some no doubt religious, as well as several cable religious channels. Tacoma isn't exactly the bible-belt, so if there were going to be challenges to the programming content they most likely would have occured there, than in the heart of the south.

What is Push Polling:

[boijames]

From Wikipedia:

A push poll is a political campaigntechnique in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll]. Push polls are generally viewed as a form of negative campaigning. The term is also sometimes used incorrectly to refer to legitimate polls which test political messages, some of which may be negative. Push polling has been condemned by the American Association of Political Consultants.

The mildest forms of push polling are designed merely to remind voters of a particular issue. For instance, a push poll might ask respondents to rank candidates based on their support of abortion in order to get voters thinking about that issue.

More negative are attacks on another candidate by using polls. These attacks often contain information with little or no basis in fact.

True push polls tend to be very short, with only a handful of questions, so as to make as many calls as possible. The data obtained is discarded, not analyzed. Any poll that does not ask demographic information -- such as age, income, or race -- is generally not a legitimate poll, but some form of advertising.

Perhaps the most famous alleged use of push polls is in the 2000 United States Republican Party primaries, when it was alleged that George W. Bush's campaign used push polling to torpedo the campaign of Senator John McCain. Voters in South Carolina reported being asked "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" an allegation that had no substance but planted the idea of undisclosed allegations in the minds of thousands of primary voters. McCain and his wife had in fact adopted an Asian child.