Comcast Executive Said to Have Conditioned Carriage on Ownership Stake
A Comcast executive told WealthTV it wouldn’t be carried unless the cable operator owned a stake in the independent programmer, WealthTV President Charles Herring testified at a hearing before an FCC administrative law judge. Herring said the comments by Alan Dannenbaum, Comcast’s vice president of programming, were unambiguous. About the same time, Adelphia, a cable operator that Comcast was buying part of, reversed course and refused to carry WealthTV as Dannenbaum helped scotch that distribution, Herring said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Comcast has said it didn’t favor its own networks over WealthTV (CD April 22 p13), as that channel contends in the case before Richard Sippel, the FCC’s chief administrative law judge. The judge at several points expressed skepticism about Herring’s comments, including when he said he didn’t often meet individually with Comcast executives and left that to a subordinate. Sippel ruled that Herring couldn’t speak about conversations with the employee, Donna Thomas, because the testimony would be hearsay.
Herring quoted Dannenbaum as having said, “We're not going to make another MTV on the backs of Comcast without owning it.” At that point, “it appeared to me the discussions were basically going nowhere,” Herring said. Dannenbaum said he planned to tell Adelphia “to make sure that launch would not take place,” Herring said. “I pleaded with him not to.”
About two weeks later, “I got a call from a very angry senior executive at Adelphia” who said its carriage deal for WealthTV was off, Herring said. “I said it had been approved,” he added. “She said that didn’t matter.” If WealthTV replaced a channel in Adelphia’s lineup, as was slated to happen, “she'd shut down the service,” Herring testified that the executive had said.
Sippel wondered why Herring hadn’t handled more of the negotiations with Comcast instead of leaving much of the work to Thomas, who’s no longer with WealthTV. “This is like signing a $20 million ballplayer,” Sippel said. “You obviously have to have that other person as a witness” to testify about what Thomas related to Herring, the judge added. Herring said Thomas had a closer relationship with Comcast.