Tioga Herald

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Shameful lack of delivery by a newspaper which has a rich tradition in Binghamton, NY, but is now being run from the USA Today Network out of town. I hate driving to get the newspaper, but these people are screwing us here in rural Newark Valley and they don’t care, as they have shut down their local office. Thus, I am really happy to listen to my music on a locally-owned radio station like Cool 106.7. I just don’t like hearing an advertisement which indicates you favor of those who like 1980s music and the rest of us, like those in rural Newark Valley who are not getting effective newspaper delivery, are like chopped liver. Don’t give me any excuses about why the Press & Sun-Bulletin is not doing delivery of the newspaper, because there is a hidden agenda of newspaper fat cat executives which began with the 2008 recession and contains a hidden agenda for strategies to destroy print copies of newspapers. It is not a “natural” function of progress. That is a complete lie. Thus, I become happy and positive from listening to Cool 106.7 and hearing about “locally owned.” I wish the Press & Sun-Bulletin were locally owned because what they have done to whittle down the content is what has hurt the newspaper, not printing of print editions. I protest and object to such a fabrication for which too damn many people just accept without question while giving BS about how bad the government and politicians are. The problem is not government. The problem is big fat cats in the younger generation who have centralized control of the supply siders in the same way the communists did to the Soviet Union – centralized control. The difference is that it is NOT the government doing this, as in Moscow of the past. It is actually the opposite with big fat cats and PACs following the words of freaking Reagan (who said “the problem is the government”) who supported supply side economics for the purpose of eliminating regulation by a third-party called the government and ultimately, the monopolization of business which has pushed small locally owned business under the bus. Therefore, I take this time to write to your station and express thanks for being a locally owned radio outlet with music I enjoy listening. But my interests are 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and less emphasis on 1980s. However, living in centrally controlled America with big business which acts like the communists of the former Soviet Union, I have less choices, so I have to put up with what I hear of people from the 1980s music. Believe it or not, there are others of us who like those other decades, cannot afford SiriusXM (in retirement), and ….. besides SiriusXM eliminated their channel 4 from the 40s, channel 5 from the 50s, etc., and replaced with boring repetitive stuff from one person we might like. I like variety, even if I do like Frank Sinatra or the Beatles, etc. I don’t desire to listen to one station which broadcasts ONLY Frank Sinatra or ONLY the Beatles. BORING! A variety from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.We might be smaller numbers, but so what? SO WHAT? We are still alive and deserve music that we enjoy, too. And glory be, but teaching music appreciation in Florida, I discovered that many young people are never given the opportunity to listen to music outside the shallow young people’s herd, so they reject anything which does not conform to their wishes.

With all of this being said and based on what I said about being forced to drive to pick up a newspaper because of the lousy customer service at the Press & Sun-Bulletin (Gannett), I get to listen to Cool 06.7 while I increase my carbon footprint and pollute the atmosphere from my gasoline engine. What I really disdain are the damn little snippets which shallow people think are funny. Being forced to listen (or turn it off) this morning, I heard a statement about getting up and being positive. Driving a car to pick up my newspaper is NOT positive and does NOT start my day off very well. But to listen to a brief statement about, “be positive and don’t listen to the news,” I wanted to turn off your radio station. What a shallow remark to make. The correct statement would be, “be positive by demanding we NOT pay, through high cable television prices, for bloviating political analysis stations like Fox, CNN, or MSNBC, etc.” We are FORCED to pay for these things and that really removes my positive feelings. Listening to events and what is happening in the world, believe it or not, is not entertainment. It has been turned into entertainment and it sucks, especially when we are FORCED to listen to the bloviating lies of some of the politics. Some is NOT lies. Some of it is. But no one differentiates between the truth and lies. As a student of Syracuse University and the Newhouse School of Communications classes, I am speaking out about how bad this has become, but even more so. Rather than 350 channels of crap on cable, give us the opportunity to watch political bloviating, religion, ESPN and sports an opportunity to choose on demand. In days gone by, I chose Syracuse University football on demand by purchasing tickets at Archbald and/or Carrier Dome. I was not forced to purchase ALL sports games with an athletic fee, back in the 1980s. Today, based on the model of cable television, as a graduate student at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), I was FORCED to pay an athletics fee in order to get into any sporting event at FAU for free. And people complain about tuition? Go to hell. Our FAU Graduate Student Government Association failed at getting the message through – the graduate students did not want to go to all games. At SU, I have never held an interest in watching basketball, baseball, lacrosse, or anything else. Just football. Should I be there today and asked to pay an overall athletic fee, I would protest. But no one listens to the people today, only the shallow ones with big mouths get heard – such as those who love the 1980s music, as we hear in your commercials. Whether cable television and paying for a menu of choices as if we pay a restaurant for everything on its menu. But no one makes sense of what I am saying. So, I like learning the news and reading many non-news items in the newspapers. Our visual impairment makes it difficult to read electronic editions, let alone the expense required to make such a technology easy to use while sitting sipping coffee in an easy chair.

I am not going to shut up in this regard and work to reach out to as many people as possible. Because a collective voice does more than one voice. Sure. At FAU, that collective voice against an athletics fee was ignored. But that is not the norm in my life. We in the SGA of SUNY got the assistance of Binghamton Republican Senator Warren Anderson and did, with a collective voice, protect some of the destruction some lawyer-politicians from New York City metro area wanted to push on upstate SUNY colleges. I was part of that collective effort, even if I was not writing and leading the effort. That part was done by the SUNY SGA.

Do I make my point clearly enough? Or is it just going to have holes shot into what I say by unsubstantiated facts and then some lousy conclusions made?