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Manchester Republican Victoria Sullivan had her Twitter account permanently suspended last week after she shared a New Hampshire Journal article about Manchester’s homeless crisis. And she has no idea why.

“If you’re a conservative, especially a conservative woman, they try to silence your voice,” she told NHJournal.

Sullivan, a former state representative and two-time mayoral candidate in Manchester, tweeted NHJournal’s coverage of Mayor Joyce Craig’s ongoing struggle to address the city’s growing homeless crisis. Soon after, Twitter shut down her account.

Sullivan says she does not know why she was suspended. “I am appealing, but they don’t tell you anything,” Sullivan said. “They don’t tell you what Twitter rules were violated.”

Craig was once considered a rising star in the New Hampshire Democratic Party, believed to have her eye on a run for the governor’s office. Amid the crime and homelessness during her tenure, however, many Democrats privately express doubts about a bid for higher office. Last week, Craig and a group of her fellow Democratic mayors wrote Gov. Chris Sununu asking him to deploy the National Guard to address the homelessness plaguing their cities and towns. Critics say it was an attempt to deflect criticism for her mismanagement of the issue.

Sullivan said she is not a heavy Twitter user. On Thursday she retweeted New Hampshire Journal’s article with her own comments, including the demand for Craig to resign. In the days before the suspension, Sullivan also posted videos of Manchester business owners speaking at a public Board of Alderman meeting about the homeless crisis impacting the city.

This is not the first time Sullivan has been banned on Twitter. During her first run for mayor, Sullivan was booted from the platform and unable to get back on despite an appeal. She thinks her photos from the Women’s Self-Defense League family picnic may have triggered someone enough that she was reported.

Sullivan said New Hampshire liberals engage in egregious behavior on the platform without any seeming reprisals from the company. Rep. Maria Perez (D-Milford) was forced to issue an apology in 2021 after she sent a post about Israel widely viewed as anti-Semitic. Rep. Alissandra Rodríguez-Murray, (D-Manchester) referred to Jewish people as termites on the platform last year.  In 2019, New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley retweeted a post that included the “N-word.”

All three are still active on Twitter.

Twitter did not respond to multiple requests for information, including an explanation for Sullivan’s suspension. The phone number listed on the company website does not seem to work and the email address for the Twitter media relations team immediately bounced back.

Twitter’s corporate offices are reportedly in turmoil a few months after the company was bought out by mercurial billionaire Elon Musk for $44 billion. After firing most of the Twitter staff, Musk himself has come under fire for his handling of the social media company.

According to the Associated Press, the company no longer has a media relations team. The AP was seeking comment on its story reporting Twitter is behind on rent payments for the San Francisco headquarters.

Meanwhile, Craig’s struggles to manage Manchester’s homeless crisis continue. The city suffered several high-profile incidents over the Christmas holidays, including the deaths of two homeless people and the birth of a child in freezing temperatures at a homeless encampment. The mother, Alexandra Eckersley, 26, was well known to Manchester authorities. She is the daughter of former Red Sox pitcher and sports commentator Dennis Eckersley.

The baby was naked and struggling to breathe when authorities found him.

Facing political blowback. Craig issued an order to vacate Sunday for the homeless encampment on the corner of Manchester and Pine Streets. “The notice will be posted at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, January 9, 2023, and individuals must vacate themselves and their belongings by 12:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 17,” according to a statement from the Craig administration.

“At what point does Gov. Sununu decide the state must step in?” Sullivan said in response to the news. “These people will be scattered into our trails, in our neighborhood, and many will die. This is insanity!”

For some Granite State fans of Newsmax, 2021 ended with a fizzle, not a bang.

On December 31, Atlantic Broadband, a cable provider that serves 18 states, including New Hampshire, dropped the conservative news channel from its lineup without notice. Newsmax immediately responded to that decision with full-throated charges of censorship.

“Despite our high ratings… it is clear that Atlantic doesn’t like Newsmax’s point of view,” Newsmax said in a thundering message to its viewers. “They don’t want our strong support of American values you care about…Atlantic doesn’t like Newsmax or its news perspective and they want to shut us down.”

Predictably perhaps, Atlantic Broadband’s response seemed to paraphrase the last words of “The Godfather’s” Tessio: Tell Newsmax it was never politics. It was just business.

According to a statement posted on the company’s website: “While we worked in good faith to negotiate a new agreement, Newsmax insisted on unreasonable terms and conditions that would have resulted in increased TV fees for all Atlantic Broadband customers even though Newsmax is available for free for other viewers. This is unfair to Atlantic Broadband customers, including those who enjoy the channel.  Because we could not reach a new agreement, the channel is no longer offered on our lineup.”

So, what to make of this? Supporters of Newsmax are understandably suspicious given progressives’ ongoing calls for cable channels to drop conservative news outlets, including Newsmax and Fox News Channel, that they claim spread falsehoods about the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

The Newsmaxers’ arched eyebrows might be further raised upon learning Atlantic Broadband recently signed franchise agreements with at least four New Hampshire localities (Concord, Dover, Somersworth and Durham) to provide high-speed fiber internet, voice, and TV service. Could there have been a quid pro quo involved?  Not inconceivable. But that would be a big concession for Atlantic given that it serves viewers in numerous deeply red states, including Mississippi and Alabama.

On the flip side, cable providers routinely drop content providers, including local broadcast TV stations and national cable networks. That typically happens because the two parties can’t reach a new agreement on how much the cable provider will pay to carry the station or network’s content. You know, those radio ads urging you to “Call XYZ Cable today and tell them you want the Bowling Channel”?  That’s the content provider seeking negotiation leverage with the cable provider.

And as for ratings, in 2021, Newsmax’s viewership ranked 60th among cable TV networks, with an average daily viewership of 186,000.

If that number seems small in a nation of more than 330 million people, keep in mind the highest-rated cable channel, Fox News, averaged 1.3 million last year. Its highest-rated show, Tucker Carlson, typically had about 3 million viewers.

CNN averaged just 787,000 daily viewers.

In other words, battles over cable carriage are becoming more like fights in academia. The brawls are so bloody because the stakes are so low. Cable TV is on the wane. In 2016, 63 percent of Americans had cable TV, according to a CBS News poll. Today that number is 45 percent. During that same period, households that stream their video content jumped from 20 percent to 37 percent.

A similar 2021 study by the Pew Research Center makes it clear that older Americans are the last bastion of cable TV viewership:

“Only about a third (34 percent) of Americans ages 18 to 29 now get TV through cable or satellite, down 31 percentage points from 2015. Among those 50 and older, the decline has been less dramatic. Those ages 50 to 64 saw a 14-point drop since 2015. Those 65 and older saw a 5-point decline, which is not a statistically significant difference.”

Viewership for cable news channels tends to skew older. The median age of Fox News viewers is 68. The median for CNN is 64. So, it makes sense for Newsmax to fight to stay on every cable provider’s roster.

But cable TV is like an icicle on a 38-degree day. It will be around for a while, but it gets smaller every minute. Smart content providers, including Newsmax, understand the future lies in live streaming and video podcasts. As Atlantic Broadband pointed out in its statement, Newsmax fans can stream the channel from the Newsmax website for free. It is also available via several streaming services and devices, including Roku, Amazon’s Fire TV, and Apple TV.

And, as Newsmax noted in its statement, cable devotees in New Hampshire can always switch to another cable or satellite service that continues to carry Newsmax, such as DirecTV or AT&T.

The messaging from Newsmax and other conservative media outlets may remain consistent. But how that message is delivered is very much in transition.