Is Wolf Blitzer worth $42.00 a month?

So, I currently have a TV which appears to receive zero channels. And, as you probably already know, there isn't that much to do in Princeton. As a result, I am thinking of getting myself some cable. Wolf Blitzer, here we come. Or, maybe, here we don't come. The local cable outfit, Patriot Media, charges a quite reasonable $14.80 a month for their "Limited Basic" package, which gets you the following extensive but rather duplicative assemblage:

1. (nothing)
   
2. New York CBS
3. Philadelphia CBS
4. New York NBC
5. Philadelphia FOX
6. Philadelphia ABC
7. New York ABC
8. the cable company's own "Patriot 8"
9. New York "MyNetwork TV" (what?)
10. Philadelphia NBC
11. New York "CW" (this)
12. Philadelphia PBS
13. New York PBS
14. WFMZ-TV (wikipedia: "a general-interest independent television station in Allentown, Pennsylvania")
15. a "family-friendly" channel called ION
16. New York FOX
17. Philadelphia MyNetworkTV
18. "NYC-TV" (seemingly a generic CItyTV-like item)
    
19. WMBC ("an independent full-power independent station licensed to Newton, NJ")
20. the Spanish-language Telemundo
21. the Home Shopping Network
22. Telefutura (another Spanish station)
23. New Jersey PBS
24. Shop NBC
25. Educational TV
26. Mercer County Community College TV
27. the Princeton University Channel (who knew?)
28. Princeton Borough Government Access
29. Princeton Township Government Access
30. TV30 (can't figure out what this is)
31. Philadelphia CW
32. a Christian channel
33. Chicago CW (just what I need)
34. TV Guide
35. a Philadelphia-based non-PBS public station
36. another Christian channel ("Sonshine" (sic): clearly these people need to read Aquinas)
37. CSPAN
38. CSPAN2
39. the Lehigh Valley's PBS
40. "Local Access" (whatever that means)
41. Univision (also in Spanish)
42. QVC (home shopping).
    

But no Wolf. This requires "Expanded Basic", including the Wolf's own CNN, the Weather Channel, the sports channels - basically, anything with a specific theme, and anything I would actually spend much time watching - which takes an additional $42 for a total of $56.80 a month. Fifteen bucks a month is quite reasonable; fifty-seven, not so much. It equals two round trips to New York, say. Or 45 bottles of Papst Blue Ribbon at the D-Bar. But as anyone who has seen Wolf Blitzer knows, the value of Wolf Blitzer is high indeed. Every weekday, three hours of eight video screens at once, of token critics of American hegemony being shut down at high volume, of an unmatched electoral circus: it's only September 2007, and already there is a team live in Iowa and one live in New Hampshire.

We have in the Group both a scholar of Media Ecology and a social scientist for whom economics is an allied discipline, so we should be able to determine this with the utmost precision: how much is Wolf Blitzer worth?

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