I’ve often thought that great minds think alike. I just never thought my mind would process and conjure up the same things as the mind behind “Xanadu.”

A little less than two years ago, when the FCC started publicly considering/lofting-trial-balloons about possibly adopting an a la carte cable pricing strategy – where you could pick and choose the exact channels you wanted to subscribe to – I, in my previous existence as a think tank-er, was interviewed by Networking on the topic:

"Couldn't this continue the overly personalized media world -- with conservatives opting to not pay for MSNBC or CNN?" Matthew T. Felling, media director at the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a think tank in Washington D.C., told Networking.

Left-leaning consumers, meantime, might permanently tune out Fox News and conservative shows like "The O'Reilly Factor" and not just change the channel in angst.

Yesterday afternoon, Broadcasting & Cable reported that Robert Greenwald -- who directed “Xanadu” before he became a progressive documentary filmmaker – had uploaded a video online and started an Internet campaign pushing a la carte for that very outcome:

The video's kicker is a call for mandating a la carte cable carriage -- allowing subscribers to pick and choose among channels -- as a way to exclude Fox News. Greenwald also created an online petition to the FCC demanding a la carte.

"The best way to keep Fox out of your home is to force cable companies to offer ‘a la carte’ cable, where you only pay for the channels you want," the petition reads. "A la carte will lower your cable bill, prevent inappropriate programming from entering your home and will keep your money out of Fox’s pockets."

There are two arguments happening here: the people who hate paying for G4TV or Lifetime Movie Network because they never watch them, and the politically-minded people who want to Make A Statement.

I agree with the former – every time I accidentally stop on the Sci-Fi channel, I want to bleach my eyeballs – but can’t get behind the folks who want to ‘punish’ Fox or MSNBC for their content. As I wrote yesterday (and many times before), I’m not a huge fan of media tunnel vision. Ignoring the other side’s political arguments leads to an intellectual form of atrophy, where you know what you know from the people who agree with you, forming some solipsistic echo that can easily get untethered from reality.

I think that a la carte is a decent idea, as far as Bravo and Oxygen and ESPN one, two, three and “The Ocho” are concerned. But I also think that a ‘news tier’ should be adopted, immune from the a la carte concept, so that people can always access information. Then, if the militant anti-Fox or anti-MSNBC crowd wants to, they can go ahead and block that particular channel.

Furthermore, I find it odd in principle that a documentarian – a vocation normally chosen by people committed to getting more information into the public domain – is actively campaigning for people to turn away from a news outlet.