Chuckleheaded media types

It wasn't a big surprise when Charter Cable announced last week it planned to raise its rates.

One explanation cited by Charter was that it needed extra money to upgrade its cable lines. Do they mean the lines are crummy and need replacing? Or do they mean the new lines will improve the picture and sound? Either way, ongoing maintenance should be covered already. Upgrades should be part of ongoing maintenance.

The cost for low-level digital service is already expensive. It costs much more than a month's worth of natural gas, electricity or even use of a telephone by an especially chatty person who makes many long-distance calls.

Cable is already my most expensive monthly "utility" bill. I shower and cook and turn on lights daily. And I often yak on the telephone to faraway friends and relatives like a gossipy teenager.

I don't spend close that amount of money on gasoline, either. That's because I neither drive one of those petrol-sucking SUVs nor commute 30, 40 or 50 miles to and from work each way.

The other reason for the cable rate hike: Sports programming costs have risen a whopping 133 percent since 1990. Every time a professional athlete on cable TV gets a pay increase, part is paid by the cable customer, at least according to an article in Wednesday's Appeal.

As a teenage girl might say after coming home past curfew on a Saturday night and hearing that she's grounded for the next two weeks: I'm being unfairly penalized. A hockey player also might say something like that after whacking an opponent in the head with his stick and hearing he must sit in the penalty box.

But I certainly don't know this for sure, because I don't watch sports!

Professional athletes include professional log rollers, tree climbers and bocci ball players. How expensive are flannel shirts or white polyester pants? This is the type of stuff usually on cable sports channels. Chuckleheads who pay extra to watch the boxing and the other stuff might as well drink bottled water chilled in a hotel room refrigerator.

The article also stated that overall programming costs have gone up a lot more than cable companies expected. How? Reality television shows are popular right now. This type of programming is usually cheaper to produce than comedies and dramas.

I may not watch TV to see sports or "Last Celebrity Bachelor Survivor on Temptation Island: Get Me Out of Here!", but I do read and watch many other things.

Athletes complain about their coaches, their uniforms, their fans and the news media. And they make a zillion dollars to perform in front of zillions of people. Other types of entertainers lead similar lives.

I used to occasionally feel sorry for these people because it must be difficult to ditch fans or paparazzi long enough to readjust your pantyhose or remove spinach stuck between your teeth when you're a celebrity.

Pity them no more, I say. They went after attention and big money. It didn't come looking for them. Journalists should report about what famous people do and show them no mercy.

Most of them are walking corporations with armies of assistants, consultants and agents privately brokering their ever-growing payoffs. Too many of them express how they feel about virtually everything. Fashion, family, famine, war, weather all receive equal priority because too many of them are too rich and too undereducated to know what's really important.

And they feel way too much: They give significant portions of the money they make to their favorite (often bizarre) political and charitable causes.

At least a little bit of that money comes out of our pockets when we watch one of their games, buy one of their CDs or view one of their films in a theater or on cable. And these people only whine about invasion of privacy when they get flak for doing something wrong or unpopular that could harm the flow of money toward them and their minions.

The heads of companies who provide all of the entertainment these people shovel out deserve equal scrutiny. This list includes cable executives because they can raise our rates without public hearings or government oversight, as last week's article also noted.

Cable companies like to pretend they are a utility, but utility companies are more heavily regulated and answer to the people and government. Someone has to watch them.

And there's one more reason why entertainers and entertainment-related companies should be eyeballed. It comes from a newspaper editor named Finley Peter Dunne: The mission of the modern newspaper is "to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable."

Terri Harber works on the Nevada Appeal's news desk.