Last summer, I wrote about the mind-numbingly tedious battle between Comcast and Bloomberg over whether Bloomberg’s news channel was being exiled to television Siberia in most of the important Designated Market Areas or DMAs. Bloomberg filed a pretty well-documented complaint with the FCC proving that news clumps existed–something that Comcast denied.
Bloomberg went as far as to hire one Gregory S. Crawford, Professor of Economics at Warwick University, to study the distribution of news channels in Comcast’s offering and to see if they were some kind of random occurrence. In other words, Crawford analyzed whether Fox, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN, to name just a few major players, just happened to be in adjacent channels in the Comcast network.
Seriously.
Crawford came up with the startling conclusion that this was not a roll of the dice, as Comcast kind of claimed, because four or five consecutive news channels would happen by chance a mere 1% of the time.
Well, this convinced me. But Comcast, of course, is a much harder case to crack, and besides they have lots of lawyers, who didn’t need to be told to fire off a response.
Remember when Comcast bought NBC-Universal? As a condition of the merger, an FCC order required Comcast to allow independent news providers entry into existing news neighborhoods.
In its defense, Comcast said even if these mythical news neighborhoods existed, the wording of this condition actually required it to let Bloomberg set up shop only in future newsy parts of the channel, not in existing ones.
Yesterday, the FCC’s Media Bureau decided against Comcast, and agreed with Bloomberg. Here is the key part of their stunning conclusion:
You got that Comcast? News neighborhoods exist, and the Comcast-NBCU Order requires that Bloomberg
can live in them.
It should come as no surprise that Comcast said it would appeal.