You might also want to add Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and American Movie Classics (AMC) as targets for your outrage.  Both of them have a core mission of classic movies.  While both have aired their share of classic movies, they've also aired dreck like:

1. Red Dawn, Marked For Death, and Die Hard With A Vengeance on AMC this week alone.  Somehow, I just can't get my mind around any of those three being considered classic.

2. Also on AMC is the absolutely fantastic "Mad Men".  It's a superb TV series, but it isn't film.

3. TCM hews the closest to its core mission with an emphasis on really old movies (some of which I'd question the label classic).  But sometimes when they're programming theme nights they throw in a clinker or two.  Example being this Friday's retrospective on Sean Connery.  They bypass the Bond oeuvre in favor of some of Connery's other roles.  They include the stunning "The Hill" and "The Wind and the Lion".  But they include "The Russia House" and "Meteor" (both of which are decidedly not classic).  They bypassed the superb "The Man Who Would Be King" (which has been run on TMC).  To its credit, TMC doesn't run sitcoms or dramatic TV series.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

You are correct, sir. "Mad Men" is bloody brilliant, but it's neither a movie nor a classic. It seems far better suited for Showtime or HBO, but I'm not complaining. If AMC (who already produced Remember WENN and The Lot) can pony up as good a series as "Mad Men", I'm not going to complain that it's on the wrong network. If Britney Spears went into the studio with Trent Reznor, Butch Vig, and Al Jourgensen and produced a really good album of industrial dance, named the band "Death to All Celebrities", then went out on a tour of small venues looking like Soo Catwoman, would the music be invalid because of the source? If she did an album with Kim Gordon, Nina Hagen, Ani DiFranco, and Diamanda Galás, would it be instantly dismissed as fluff with no feminist weight at all?

OK, the answers to both questions are probably yes, but my point remains: If it's good, it's good. The source is irrelevant.

Now, have any of you watched either "The Business" or "The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman"?

-=Logan
Research, facts, a Republican needs not these things

Ah, but "The Business" is ABOUT independent film, as are The Henry Rollins Show, Dinner for Five, and Film School, and therefore don't violate the core mission.

Tell me, would you consider a show where various independent filmmakers talk about the process of filmmaking (scriptwriting, editing, location shooting, auditioning) a violation? Let's imagine show called "Make Your Damn Movie!" hosted by Lloyd Kaufman, Roger Corman or Robert Rodriguez*. Every week the host picks a topic, shares what he's learned, and demonstrates filmmaking technique. The goal is to instruct potential directors and to inspire them to get out and make a movie. It's a TV show, not a movie. But would THAT violate IFC's core mission?

* Despite his mainstream success with Sin City etc, Rodriguez has always maintained an DIY methodology he calls Mariachi-Style.   He shot his first commercial film El Mariachi for $7000 with a skeleton crew, and maintains that hard work and passion are far more valuable than big budgets. Because his films are relatively cheap (by Hollywood standards), it's easier for them to make a profit. The lower budgets also allow him to take risks that wouldn't be allowable with a $200 million budget. For details, read his book: Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player. Then get a camera and make a movie, damnit!

-=Logan
Research, facts, a Republican needs not these things

I guess I'm a purist, but yeah I would say that those shows violate their core mission. Would you want to see a sitcom about historical documentary makers on the History Channel? Aren't shows like Behind the Music and the Osbournes part of why MTV & VH1 started to drift away from showing any music whatsoever? Anyway, in small doses it's fine for shows like that that are more or less on point but do drift away a bit from the core. It's a problem when the network sees that those shows are cheaper to show than movies, and get the same ad revenue, and therefore decides to quite showing movies entirely. I'm not saying that's going to happen, or that anyone other than me is even thinking about it happening - but it's happened before and there's nothing to say it might not happen again.

You may or may not have a point but it's just not realistic in terms of the market. Black Entertainment Television built itself up from nothing by music videos and movies because they're cheap to license and cost almost nothing to acquire and put on the air. They never have brought and never will bring enough eyeballs to the screen to expand as a network. They're a nice second banana to bring in a steady flow of cash but original programming always has been and always will be where the money is, even in basic cable. They get big enough and they'll spin off a smaller channel that is closer to the way the original was, a la MTV2. Even cable giant ESPN fit into this model, showing things like you currently find on ESPN2 until they built up enough bank to license more top shelf sports and create original programming.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.