A Threat to Console TVs Everywhere

Today I heard some bad news for my beloved console TV. A regulation is going into effect that television broadcasts will switch from analog to digital on February 17, 2009. Just a few days after Valentine's Day, I'll lose the big, woodgrain paneled TV I love, unless I buy a $40 converter box for it. I think it's a conspiracy from the cable and satellite company to force us to use their service. I've had both before, and I decided, why pay for the extra channels? I don't want to grow a big rear because I try to watch all of those extra shows every night. They distract me too much from snowshoeing and pet grooming, which are more important hobbies.
Anyway, there are a lot of good shows on regular TV, like Nature on channel 2. I watched a beautiful episode on Christmas Day about the migration paths of animals, such as geese, monarch butterflies and salmon. Grandma liked that episode a lot too. Then we watched the Yule log burning on channel 45 for a while, courtesy of the new UHF antenna I bought for $3.18 on the Radio Shack day-after-Thanksgiving sale.
I learned about this consumer injustice from a CNNMoney.com story. To add insult to the injury of learning my console set is becoming unusable, the article also paints users of analog TVs in an unfavorable light. It says that owners of analog TVs "are likely to be poor, elderly or uneducated." Hey, maybe I'm your typical analog TV set owner. I'm just covering my grey and hiding the AARP card in my wallet. I secretly have to eat Ramen noodles every night because I can't afford Spaghettios. I really never went to college, instead I made up those 7 years I spent working on my degrees.
The assumptions made by the article's author are classist and plain rude. What does education have to do with what gadgets I choose to spend my disposable income on? Why am I likely to be "uneducated" because my TV is from 1982? I bet tons of educated people have old TVs or none at all, because they're probably busy doing whatever they took classes to learn about, like reading, bird-watching or communicating in sign language. Also, anyone who has financial education knows that consumer technology is not as good of an investment as an IRA. If you can sock $700 into your IRA, instead of buying a new flat-screen TV with it, you'll wind up with a little extra income in retirement. Obviously the article's author believes that everybody fits into one category of elderly, poor, uneducated and generally disenfranchised people just because they don't share his materialistic values about spending money on new technology.