In recent months, a bunch of cable television channels have changed their official names by dropping the word ‘the’ from them
Examples include The Golf Channel becoming Golf Channel and The Game Show Network becoming Game Show Network
This may sound trivial but it was a big enough deal for the channels to issue press releases
There must be a reason they dropped the ‘the’…what is it???
it messed up making an alphabetical list.
I think the real motivation is it invites ambiguity and channel drift. The Golf Channel sounds like it’s about the game, while Golf Channel could be just about anything.
It was done in the interest of humility and honesty. Really, how can one channel be The Golf Channel?
They’ve all moved their head offices to Ukraine.
So Disney Channel was actually ahead on a trend, for once?
But sort routines can be conditioned to ignore leading definite articles.
Bob
Then they should’ve changed it to A Golf Channel.
This is the age of the sound bite.
theend
Letters cost money.
In other news, The The will henceforth be known as The. 
What about My Little Golf Channel?
I’m not sure this is really a thing or not, but I think the trend relates what might be called “humanizing” the brand. “The Golf Channel” is cold and lacks personality, “Golf Channel” sounds closer and more personal. Same thing happened when the original name “The Facebook” was changed to “Facebook”.
Like you don’t call your friend “Joe”, “The Joe” because “Joe” is a person that has a distinct identity and is not an impersonal inanimate object.
Makes sense to me but I’m not what you call it.
What about “The Donald”? . . . . . .
. . . . . Oh . . . O.K., I take your point. :o
I was going to ask something similar to this when I recently heard NPR announce what “Dow” had done that day.
Getting rid of “the” seems to have been a bit of a trend for a while. Remakes or adaptations of works with titles that begin with “the” often seem to want to drop them in their new titles. It’s not a trend I like, personally. I don’t want to watch “Hulk”, I want to watch “The Hulk” (actually neither, but the latter would be slightly less bad). Spielberg’s adaptation of H. G. Wells’ book is entitled “War of the Worlds” rather than “The War of the Worlds”. I think it’s just part of a larger trend to make titles seem punchier. I remember mentally rolling my eyes at the title of the film “Hook” when I first became aware of it, and that was over 20 years ago.
Also, if your channels are anything like here, channels like “Golf Channel” and “Game Show Network” may well all be related and run by one company, so the rebranding of several channels might have all come from a single decision.
Are you sure they weren’t talking about Dow Chemical?
“It’s cleaner.”
I dunno, when was the last time Dow Chemical closed at 16924.28?