BOB GARFIELD: So you're watching Comedy Central on the tube, and suddenly a crawl runs along the bottom of the screen. It's from Viacom, owner of the cable channel, and other favorites such as MTV and Nickelodeon. It tells you that EchoStar, your satellite TV provider, is going to take away your Comedy Central. And suddenly the crawl begins to disappear, because someone out there is covering it over with black. That would be EchoStar which went on to actually drop Viacom channels from their dish network, but by the end of the week, caved in to Viacom's demand and put them back on the air. Joining us now with the blow by blow recap is Joe Flint, media reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Joe, welcome to OTM.

JOE FLINT: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Describe exactly what happened between EchoStar and Viacom.

JOE FLINT: Well, basically it was a contract negotiation that blew up. Viacom was negotiating a new deal for EchoStar to carry its CBS television stations as well as some of its cable networks like Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon, MTV, and they wanted to have EchoStar carry some of their new channels like Nick Tunes, which is a new kids' cartoon channel they're launching in return for carrying the CBS stations, and EchoStar felt that they were being extorted, and it's just one of these battles where no one blinked until ultimately the channels went off the air.

BOB GARFIELD: This is not the first time we've seen these kinds of squabbles break out into the public view.

JOE FLINT:Right. Time Warner and Disney, which is ABC's parent, had a very similar battle about four years ago, and that turned into a much bigger outcry than what we saw with EchoStar, because there was a lot more consumers impacted by the Time Warner situation.

BOB GARFIELD: And then Fox was in a dispute with Cox Cable at one point, no?

JOE FLINT:Yes. Viewers went for about a week without Fox Broadcasting and in some cases actually missed out on some football and other events.

BOB GARFIELD:This time around, as with the others, there was this very public spectacle of the guerilla war in which both Viacom and EchoStar struggled to get its side of the story across to viewers, some of whom I'm sure were quite perplexed. But tell me about some of the tactics employed by the two giants.

JOE FLINT: EchoStar posted the home phone number of Viacom president Mel Karmazin on its website, telling their subscribers, you know, you might lose these channels -- Call Mel and complain. Viacom was running a scroll across its channels telling subscribers that this is not our doing -- call EchoStar and let them know you don't want to lose your favorite channels. And then once the channels were gone, I think Viacom just really seemed to be more prepared for this. They had ads ready to go - like the ones that were in newspapers using their characters such as Sponge Bob to spread the word that these channels were off and that, you know, viewers should start subscribing to Direct TV or to their local cable system, and EchoStar, as far as I can tell, really didn't have any sort of rebuttal; they should have been out months in advance, making their case to their subscribers about why they thought Viacom was in the wrong here.

BOB GARFIELD:Do you have any sense that consumers were able to figure out who was who in all of this? I mean at some point don't consumers just sit there and say I'm not getting my shows on the TV -- but with no notion whatsoever of the various parties to the dispute.

JOE FLINT: That's correct, and that was why EchoStar, I think, played a bad hand. The consumer --they turn on their television and their channel's not there, they don't blame the person who owns the channel; they blame the cable company or the satellite company. You know, it's just the way of the world.

BOB GARFIELD: And did, in the end, EchoStar agree to take the package of programs that originally they didn't want any part of?

JOE FLINT:They agreed to take the package, and then some -- besides carrying Nick Tunes, they extended other deals that hadn't expired yet for some Viacom channels such as TV Land and Spike TV, and the two sides also agreed to settle all their litigation because EchoStar's big hope was that no matter what happened here, they were going to take this issue of bundling to the courts and win there. So yeah, I'd say just from my vantange point, EchoStar was humbled here.

BOB GARFIELD: Can we conclude from this contretemps that at least in the early part of the new millennium that content is still king?

JOE FLINT:In this case, I think content is still king. I mean this is why Comcast wants to buy Disney -- they don't want to buy Disney to own theme parks. They want to buy Disney to own ESPN, to own the Family Channel, to own the Disney Channel. Yeah, Comcast has all the distribution in the world; they're the biggest cable operator in the country, but they need programming. So yeah, I, I think content is still king.

BOB GARFIELD: So what does that presage for a world of increasingly consolidated and increasingly vertically integrated big media?

JOE FLINT:I, I think as both the distribution and content sides get even more consolidated, there's more of a likelihood for these companies to dig in and really stick to their guns on these battles, almost forgetting that there's a consumer out there that should be their first priority to serve.

BOB GARFIELD: And is there anything we can do about it? Or we just gotta sit here and take it?

JOE FLINT:Well, you know the - yeah, there's not a--much really the consumer can do. I mean in this case, sure, you could have dropped EchoStar right off the bat and signed up for Direct TV. But maybe three years from now Direct TV will be battling with ESPN over something, and then you might be in the same situation. No, you know, short of turning off the set and picking up a book, there's not a lot you can do.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Joe. Well, listen, thanks again.

JOE FLINT: All right. Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Joe Flint reports on the media for the Wall Street Journal.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, a media circus in Redwood City, and the many faces of public broadcasting around the world.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.