Media Bureau Orders Comcast to Move Bloomberg TV Channel Placement in Some Markets
Comcast must move Bloomberg TV to a channel position adjacent to other news channels on some cable systems, FCC Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake wrote in an order released late Wednesday (http://xrl.us/bm52km). The order granted in part a Bloomberg complaint that Comcast was violating a condition of its approval to purchase control of NBCUniversal, which owns MSNBC and CNBC. A Comcast spokeswoman said the company disagrees with the interpretation of the condition. “We plan to immediately appeal to the Full Commission and believe they will agree to enforce only conditions as they were originally negotiated and intended, and that the Media Bureau’s mis-interpretation will be overturned,” she said by e-mail.
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The bureau found that the so-called neighborhooding condition isn’t limited to channel lineups that were put together after the FCC allowed the NBCUniversal deal. A group containing “four news or business channels within a cluster of five channels positions” qualifies as a neighborhood, the order said. Comcast said there’s no support in the record for a four-channel definition of a “neighborhood.” Furthermore, “by definition, no discrimination against Bloomberg in favor of CNBC could have taken place before the NBCUniversal transaction,” the Comcast spokeswoman said: “Any retrospective condition on this subject would have been arbitrary and capricious.” A Bloomberg representative had no immediate comment.
Within 60 days, Comcast must carry Bloomberg TV in a news neighborhood “on any headend that carries Bloomberg Television, has a news neighborhood ... and does not include Bloomberg TV” in that neighborhood in the top 35 TV markets, the order said. It asked for a list of such headends within two weeks. “The Commission will address separately on a case-by-case basis any disputes between Comcast and Bloomberg involving whether a specific channel qualifies as a ‘news channel,'” the order said.
The condition doesn’t give independent news channel owners such as Bloomberg the right to be carried in multiple neighborhoods or pick its preferred neighborhood, the order said. Such an interpretation of the condition could force Comcast to manage major realignments of its channel lineup, the order said. “We do not believe the Commission contemplated that outcome in the NBCU-Comcast Order,” the order said. “Indeed, reading the condition in such a way would create the perverse result of carrying independent news and business news channels, a result clearly inconsistent with the intent of the news neighborhooding condition and the merger conditions overall.”