Seven Days reported last week that municipally owned cable TV provider Burlington Telecom is dumping Al Jazeera’s English language channel from its broadcast line-up.

We got one letter supporting BT’s decision to drop the Arab news network, and several protesting it.

Tonight, the controversy is the subject of a live call-in show at 5:25 on Channel 17 (BT channel 317). You can show up at the studio at 5 to be part of the discussion.

Blogger and VCAM producer Bill Simmon wrote about BT’s announcement on Monday, then posted about it again today. He poses the following questions:

  • If you pulled Al Jazeera because ofsubscriber complaints, and that many subscribers (or more) have askedfor it to remain, what is your justification for pulling it, exactly?
  • Willyou pull other channels out of the line-up because of similarcomplaints?  Would you pull Fox News if you received enough emails?  Ifnot, what’s different about that situation?
  • Don’tcustomers have the ability to block unwanted channels themselves (asrequired by law)?  Why pull an entire channel so nobody in thecommunity can see it?  Why not just instruct customers who don’t wantthe content in how to block it?

Tune in tonight. Looks like you might even be able to catch the program on CCTV’s fancy pants new website.

UPDATE: Burlington Telecom’s Ricard Donnelly responds to Bill’s questions in the comments thread on that post.

This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2009.

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Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at...

3 replies on “Call-in Show Tonight on BT’s On-Again Off-Again Relationship with Al Jazeera”

  1. Clarification, channel 317 is the Live Burlington channel on BT, airing Live Burlington meetings as they happen and a line up of Free speech TV programming elsewise. Channel 17, municipal access TV is shown on channel 17 on the BT system, airing municipal programming from 7 member communities. Repeats of the Al Jazeera forum will air later this month and be available as streaming video later this week.

  2. I think I’m confused because I don’t actually have a tv. I only watch ch. 17 on the web.

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