Tag: Comcast

Posted on By Guest Author David L. Cohen

The Challenge of Harnessing Change in a Global Economy

As the news media know better than anyone, the great story of our times is change – dramatic, accelerating, and often disruptive change.

The key question is whether our economy, our educational institutions, and our system of democratic self-government can harness this change for everyone’s benefit – or whether the tidal wave of change will overrun us.

To meet the challenges of change, we must think big and act boldly.  Our growing divisions, however – our self-selecting news bubbles, the tribalization of our politics, the noxious contempt each side has for the other – are making it harder to solve big problems.  The environment is certainly not conducive to serious dialogue or to constructive problem solving.

Continue reading “The Challenge of Harnessing Change in a Global Economy”
Posted on By Patrick Maines

Progressives’ Anti-Merger Mania

The proposed merger between the cable systems of Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks has brought out the usual poseurs in opposition.  I speak, of course, of such as Common Cause, Consumers Union, and Public Knowledge (all of which are wrong in their usual and tiresome way, but not certifiable), and their more extreme kin, Media Alliance and Free Press.

As it happens, there exists a bridge between these armies of progressivism in the person of former FCC commissioner Michael Copps.  Since leaving the FCC, Copps has flocked to the aid of those organizations he favored when he was a commissioner.  So it is that the gentleman is now on the board of Free Press and a “special adviser” to Common Cause.

Which, of course, is why it’s important to know the kinds of things he’s saying about the merger.  Writing in Common Dreams (“Breaking News and Views for the Progressive Community”), Copps relieves himself of opinions like these:

This merger would create a new Comcast – a national cable giant with the ability and the incentive to thwart competition, diversity, and consumer choice….  >> Read More

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on Feb. 9, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Call Me Ishmael

In Herman Melville’s novel, Captain Ahab’s obsession is with Moby Dick.  In the morality play that’s been running for years at the FCC, Chairman Kevin Martin’s obsession is with “a la carte” for cable TV.   Missing from this analogy is a communications lawyer as the novel’s Elijah — "ye shall smell land where there is no land” — perhaps because so few of them are into allegory and none say “ye,” but I digress.

The latest chapter in this struggle between good and evil took place last Thursday when, at the point of a gun, 13 cable companies provided the FCC with information, I blanch to say, about their shifting of channels to digital tiers.  Did I just say digital tiers?  Yes I did, and who wouldn’t want to investigate something like that?

For a matter of such gravity, however, it does seem, as the NCTA argued, a wee bit prejudicial and a skosh abrupt for the FCC to have sent its request from the Enforcement Bureau, and to demand the data in 14 days.  Not eager to be fined, all of the companies did in fact respond by the deadline, but it remains to be seen if the FCC will accept their responses as adequate.

This, because according to press accounts, at least some of the respondents were chary about parting with confidential information relating to their deals with program suppliers, and gobsmacked by the sheer volume of the material requested.  Comcast, for instance, estimated it would take 1,500 man hours just to compile the data for 2008.

Whether the agency accepts the companies’ reports or not, however, it’s clear that this is one fishing expedition that’s not going to end here.  Aided and abetted by such as Commissioner Copps, Kevin Martin is hell-bent, you’ll pardon the expression, on saving consumers from fleeting expletives on broadcasting, and all manner of indecent programming on cable TV, and his solution for the latter is a la carte pricing.

So, as with the captain of the Pequod, the order from the captain of the FCC is sure to remain, for at least a little while longer, “steady as she goes."