It seems that anyone who has something other than no TV or mere over-the-air TV gets to watch this take place — in this case, from the website Keep the Weather Channel:

DIRECTV DROPPED THE WEATHER CHANNEL

This is because, as you may have been able to discern (pardon the sarcasm), DirecTV is no longer carrying The Weather Channel due to yet another dispute over how much DirecTV should pay The Weather Channel to carry The Weather Channel — fees that, as with nearly every other cable channel, are passed on to DirecTV’s customers.

If the above isn’t blunt enough for your taste, elsewhere on this home page are the dire words “If you’re a DirecTV customer, you’ve lost your access to The Weather Channel’s life-saving coverage.” They’ve even got heavy-hitter “Friends” you can see here, and you can “Take the Switch Pledge” and “Don’t let DirecTV control the weather.”

If this seems familiar, it should. Last summer, Time Warner Cable and Journal Communications had a dispute that deprived Time Warner’s customers of watching Packers preseason games. I think every TV station owner in the Green Bay market besides Journal (which owns WGBA-TV) has had a carriage dispute, shown by crawls on the bottom that implore viewers to call an 800 number or go online somewhere to register your umbrage. It seems these days as though every TV station or cable channel owner and every cable or satellite provider are engaged in a pitched battle against each other over carriage fees, with the former’s viewers and the latter’s customers the losers, of course.

Unlike most of the other disputes, however, DirecTV didn’t start its own We’re-Right-They’re-Wrong website. Instead, BusinessWeek reports:

Where do you check the weather: phone or TV? That’s the essence of the fight between DirecTV (DTV) and Weather Channel, which disappeared early today for 20 million subscribers of the satellite broadcaster. The companies have been waging a public battle over how much DirecTV will pay for the channel.

DirecTV wanted to cut the fees it pays for weather programming by “more than 20 percent,” Weather Channel’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David Kenny says. “I think it’s done,” he says of the talks. “There’s never been an earnest negotiation. They have taken a very arbitrary stance that they don’t need the Weather Channel on DirecTV.”

The satellite broadcaster sees weather as a Web function—the average app-equipped smartphone can tell you whether you’ll need an umbrella quicker and more easily than a television can. DirecTV also argues that Weather Channel has replaced roughly 40 percent of its live forecast broadcasting with reality TV-style programming such as Deadliest Space Weather, Coast Guard Alaska, Prospectors, and Hurricane Hunters. “Consumers understand there are now a variety of other ways to get weather coverage, free of reality show clutter, and that the Weather Channel does not have an exclusive on weather coverage–the weather belongs to everyone,” Dan York, DirecTV’s chief content officer, said in a statement.  …

The satellite broadcaster has replaced the channel with weather from WeatherNation TV, a Colorado-based weather forecaster launched in 2010 by Dish Network (DISH) amid its own carriage-fee dispute with Weather Channel. That programming is also available for free on Roku’s streaming boxes.

Well, the weather does belong to everyone (unfortunately for Wisconsinites right now), though weather coverage does not. Taxpayers pay for the National Weather Service, so there are alternatives to the Weather Channel. Nearly every TV station with a news department employs degreed and certified meteorologists to forecast and broadcast the local weather, because weather is a proven driver of TV news ratings.

My favorite online meteorologist, Mike Smith (who works for one of those alternatives, which is developing its own weather channel), posted this on Facebook:

I believe the Weather Channel has hurt its own brand so much that it will some day be studied in college marketing classes. Yes, there have been huge changes with the internet, etc., but airing ridiculous programming and then asking Congress to intervene because they are essential to public safety is laugh out loud ridiculous. 

My interest in The Weather Channel started waning during a Memorial Day 2008 tornado outbreak in northeastern Iowa, including the EF5 tornado that flattened Parkersburg, Iowa and killed several people:

This was of keen interest at the time because we were in Wisconsin’s most southwestern county, one of the state’s top counties for tornadoes and, it seemed, in the path of the storms. The three Waterloo/Cedar Rapids/Dubuque stations did excellent wall-to-wall coverage of the storms.

What did The Weather Channel do? Reruns of “Forecast Earth,” their global warming/climate change propaganda series. TWC has abandoned all premise of scientific objectivity to the global warming/climate change/it’s-all-Americans’-fault crowd. For instance:

• Large predators are declining! (Specifically, Indian tigers.)
• Carbon pollution up 2 percent!
• How human-caused-climate-change skeptics (which they call “climate contrarians”) are wrong.
• American wimps about cold weather.

Similar to the rest of the Algore crowd, TWC has yet to study such inconvenient questions as whether humans drive climate change instead of having some indeterminate influence, if climate change is actually a bad thing, and the global climate change cure is worse than the disease.

The Weather Channel also covers, if that’s what you want to call it, weather with:

• “Wake Up with Al,” with NBC-TV’s Al Roker. I like Roker, but Roker is not a meteorologist.
• “Highway thru Hell.”
• “Coast Guard Alaska.”
• “Breaking Ice.”
• “Prospectors.”
• “Freaks of Nature.”

Even their supposed weather coverage strikes one as unscientific. What does the weather have to do with the flu, or allergies? Or, for that matter, green?

(I was going to go on a 10-mile run today, but look at the Fitness Index and the Aches and Pains Index! I better stay home.)

And then there’s the mobile meteorologists, Jim Cantore and Mike Seidel (among others), who TWC flies or drives into the center of bad storms, putting into danger not merely Cantore and Seidel, but all the staffers who have to go with them, as well as others who have to help the crew on scene. (Does it seem spectacularly dumb to send a satellite truck, which has a lot of parts attractive to lightning, into severe weather?) Of course, other TV channels and stations do the same thing, and I assume it will continue until someone is actually killed live on TV while reporting. (Maybe.)

This isn’t weather coverage, it’s weather porn, and it negatively affects The Weather Channel’s credibility. (But I suppose it sells ads.) My kids like “Coast Guard Alaska,” but to pretend that’s weather coverage makes you look dishonest.

The other interesting aspect is that, at least on The Weather Channel’s Facebook page, viewers are fighting back, and not always against DirecTV:

• ALERT! The Weather Channel is not telling you the truth. They are also big business about MONEY. DirecTV did not drop the Weather Channel. The Weather Channel dropped DirecTV. I have inside information and I’ve posted some comments on this site to try to help tell the truth. DirecTV has been very professional at dealing with The Weather Channel, but they have not been the same. You can go to this link to read the truth and keep up on the negotiations. They are still in negotiations. I personally know someone who works with Direct TV!!!
• Give me CURRENT WEATHER CONDITIONS including my LOCAL weather (as advertised) within the TN/NC Smoky Mountains which is vastly different from the weather conditions of the lower lying nearby towns/cities. I couldn’t possibly care any less about all of those stupid little personality programs that have been added. Who cares about some “Storm Story” about some storm that happened 10 or more years ago. How about TODAY’S weather!?
• If any other network starts a 24/7 weather channel, I am there. I am tired of the Weather Channel trying to be the Discovery Channel. I tune to the Weather Channel to see weather, not all the other mindless crap they have on. Come on Weather Channel. Listen to your viewers or you will be big time losers.
• You actually were able to find weather forecasts on the weather channel? That’s a feat in and of itself! Not to mention that they aren’t even forecasts – just individuals reading off of teleprompters and computer screens that couldn’t even forecast a sunny day.
• Weather channel, you used to be a viable source of information and a legitimate weather news source. You, like all the other cable “news” channels are nothing more than personality driven pablum and reality shows. Fact is, technology has changed. You, like CNN, NBC and FoxNews have become dinosaurs. Plenty of other options on TV, the internet and in our pockets with our phones. I still have your app on my phone and use it along with weather underground and accuweather. Unless, of course you decide that your free app will become a pay app and become another stream of revenue for you and NBC Universal. You admitted yourself that your continuous weather format was antiquated when you decided to incorporate reality shows. Fact is, throw together a few reality shows and rerun them ad nauseum and you have saved a ton of money by not having the expense of live broadcast during slow weather times when, God forbid, no one is in danger. Your drama queen attitude on your website about how much danger DirecTV subscribers are in is pathetic and nauseating and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Urging people to go to their representatives and demand the weather channel back. Unbelievable. Do us all a favor and say hello to the T-Rex on your way out.

These are all business disputes. The fine print in all the agreements with satellite and cable providers specifies that your provider has the right to discontinue carriage of channels at any time, whether or not you like those channels, and regardless of whose fault it is — whether DirecTV is offering too little or The Weather Channel is asking too much.

There is a certain whistling-past-the-graveyard aspect to this too, on both sides. If I want to know our weather, why should I have to wait until “Local on the 8s”? The Internet, whether accessed on computer or smartphone, gets you the information you want when you want it, while allowing you to avoid the propaganda from the Church of Algore, in TWC’s case. The increasing amount of content available online (including a lot of TWC programming) means you don’t have to wait until the regularly scheduled viewing of “Prospectors” to watch.

The Weather Channel isn’t the only place to get weather information. DirecTV isn’t the only source for TV. Consumer choice is at the heart of free enterprise.