In today’s USA Today, sports reporter Michael McCarthy writes about a $100 million ad campaign NFL Network says it will launch to force carriage of the network by cable operators that don’t yet offer it. At Cox Communications, we already carry NFL Network in most markets on Cox Digital Cable, and the long-term contract we signed last year entitles Cox to carry the eight additional live games the network will be airing starting in November.

We have no beef with the “objective” news element of McCarthy’s story; however, in his accompanying column, he appears to advocate only one side of an argument and seems to be misled on at least one basic business dynamic of cable. “When there are disputes with programmers, they (cable distributors) flip the off button until the beef is settled,” he writes. That’s untrue, or at least misleading. Cable distributors (like Cox) must pay network owners (like NFL Network) for the right to deliver the network to their customers. The distributor is legally forbidden to air the network without the owner’s permission. So, if there’s a dispute and the two parties can’t agree on contract terms, it’s the network owner that denies permission for carriage and, therefore, “flips the off button.”

As for the declaration that cable TV operators are “the most stubborn, monopolistic sector of the media world,” we respectfully suggest reading up on developments in the multi-channel video realm over, say, the last decade—including the fact that satellite TV has been commercially available and viable for about 10 years and enjoys about 25 percent market share. And, for some objective analysis of these disputes between cable distributors and network owners, delving into the dramatically rising cost of sports programming would be a great place to start. For instance, in the case of one certain cable distributor, over 30% of the fees it and its customers pay for the all of the roughly 50 networks on the expanded basic tier of channels goes to two networks—both of them sports channels!