Cablevision Silences Presidential Speech On LI

By Dan Rattiner

Just after noon, on Tuesday, September 19, President Bush gave a very important speech to the nation. It started at 12:20 p.m., it was broadcast on all news channels and he was ten minutes into it when everyone on Long Island watching had the sound suddenly go out. This was an Island-wide audio failure over the Cablevision system, and it affected all 800,000 subscribers from Queens to Montauk Point on all channels. You could see the President's lips moving but you couldn't hear what he was saying.

Subscribers tried channel hopping to see if he was saying anything on CNN or MSNBC or any of the other channels, but it was all the same. Nothing. Whatever it was Mr. Bush was saying was heard everywhere else in the country, but not on Long Island.

As for Cablevision, they rushed around trying to find the cause of the problem and fix it. It took them more than thirty minutes to get the sound restored, by which time Mr. Bush had leaned forward toward the camera, spoken a few final sober words and then faded to black.

On CBS, the sound came back on five minutes into the next program that was on, which was Bob Barker's "The Price is Right."

During the rest of the day, there was considerable discussion about what the President might have said. Some people said the Democrats had cut the sound off. Others said maybe it was a terrorist plot. A few people said it could very well have been the Republicans. Whatever the President says these days doesn't go over very well. It might have been the Republicans.

Or, it might also have been the Republicans because if the terrorists had knocked the sound off, then Mr. Bush and his team had prevented anything terrible from happening after that. They'd nipped it in the bud.

Anyway, usually everybody knows what the President is going to say, anyway. So it was no great loss.

Cablevision workers, coming up covered with grease and dirt from the bowels of that company's technical network facilities in Medford after crawling around among the wires, said that they weren't sure what it was, but they apparently wiggled something down there in a junction box that controls the user emergency alert system, and it got fixed.

"We worked quickly to resolve the matter and apologize to our customers for the disruption," company spokesperson Jim Maiella said.

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