Comcast’s planned purchase of control in NBC Universal would create horizontal and vertical...

Rogerson of Northwestern University went through slides with review head John Flynn purporting to show those harms that previously were discussed with other commission officials (CD April 20 p18). Separately, a group opposing the deal that’s advised by ex-FCC Chairman Kevin Martin criticized Comcast’s plan to put $20 million into a venture capital fund for expanding opportunities to minority entrepreneurs (CD July 9 p1) as “extremely insulting.” The company spends that amount of money annually on basic office supplies like paper clips, said National Coalition of African American Owned Media President Stanley Washington Wednesday. “NCAAOM will not be deterred and will continue to fight for diverse ownership on the Comcast platform until they agree to a pre-merger commitment to allocate 10 percent of their channel capacity (approximately 50 Networks) to Wholly-Owned African American Media interests and widely carried on their basic tier.” That works out to committing $800 million in annual spending, Washington said. Speaking Tuesday night at an FCC informational hearing in Chicago on Comcast-NBCU, Wide Open West CEO Colleen Abdoulah again sought “robust, complete and long-lasting conditions.” Otherwise, “it will result in material harm to consumers and competition,” said Abdoulah, also on ACA’s board. Comcast’s past actions show it likely will decrease local programming on NBC Universal-owned TV stations if the deal goes through, President Tyrone Brown of opponent Media Access Project told the event. Brown is also a former FCC commissioner. “Aside from public service announcements and regional sports programming, about which Comcast is very aggressive, it has largely declined to get into the mix of creating its own local programming.” The deal would give Comcast additional incentive to favor content it owns over that owned by independent programmers, said Tennis Channel CEO Ken Solomon. The channel has made a complaint to the FCC that Comcast discriminated against it in favor of programming Comcast owns. Its pledge to add additional independent networks isn’t enough, Solomon said in his opening statement in Chicago. “This voluntary commitment does nothing to ensure that new networks will be able to obtain terms and conditions of carriage that are comparable to what Comcast offers its own affiliated networks that compete with these new networks."