More on the Subject of Wide Screen

The rule for games that the choice of wide screen cropping is ultimately the decision of the game developers does not apply to television. While a game engine is potentially capable of rendering the image at any given resolution, TV isn't.
If only tv service providers and/or channel operators could all figure out how to properly broadcast wide screen content, especially when it's HD.
Having wide screen content encoded in a letterboxed format on DVDs is bad enough. Obviously all wide screen DVD content should be encoded as anamorphic.
But what's even worse is when wide screen HDTV content is scaled down both horizontally and vertically so that it appears letterboxed on a 4:3 set, but on a proper wide screen it looks like some retarded picture-in-picture mode. I mean, WHAT THE FUCK are they thinking?

Below is a 16:9 image. This is what it should look like on my wide screen TV.
Poor people with 4:3 sets should either see a horizontally-cropped image:
or a scaled-down, letterboxed image:
The following, however, is a fucking abomination. In NO circumstances should wide screen programs be broadcast in this format: