Reconnecting Rural & Urban America

As we've seen long before the election, there is a clear, and growing, wall being built between urban and rural America as a result of the recent and ongoing media consolidation that RFD-TV has been witnessing now for the past several years.  If it's not a drought, a disaster, or something bad happening in rural America, there is no longer national news coverage of any kind.  There is also a total disconnect by many executives in major cities who now really do view this as flyover country.  In May 2014, after RFD-TV was dropped by Comcast Cable in Colorado and New Mexico, I was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee regarding the proposed Comcast/Time Warner merger and the possible impact of continued urban-media consolidation to the public interest.  On January 28, 2016, as a last resort, RFD-TV took out full page ads in both the Washington Post and New York Times newspapers against an unresponsive Verizon FiOS TV after they removed only rural themed programming – Outdoor Channel, Sportsman's Channel, The Weather Channel, and RFD-TV – from their channel lineups despite the strongest possible protests from Verizon's own customer base.