Circle City Opposes Dish Redaction in Discrimination Case
Circle City Broadcasting opposes a Dish Network motion seeking to seal court documents in Circle City’s unsuccessful discrimination case against Dish that mention the retransmission consent rates offered by Dish to the broadcaster, said an opposition filing in U.S. District…
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Court for the Southern District of Indiana Thursday (see 2304030072). Dish told the court a 17-word sentence fragment in Chief U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt’s summary judgment order describing Dish’s negotiations with Circle City reveals sensitive information about its negotiation practices. The fragment says Dish refused to contract with Circle City for fees after it bought two Indiana TV stations “for the longest time offering zero dollars, and at the eleventh hour offering only pennies per subscriber.” This information “is highly sensitive and accordingly guarded, particularly given the risk of competitive harm that disclosing such information presents in the competitive retransmission-consent industry,” said Dish’s brief asking for the sentence to be redacted. “Although Circle City lost the summary judgment motion, it is ultimately a media company,” said Circle City’s filing. “It believes in the First Amendment. It believes that the basis for a public body’s decision should be available to the public.” The judge’s order doesn’t discuss the specifics of Dish’s retrans contracts but uses generalities, and that similar language was used in Circle City’s publicly available complaint, Circle City said. “Dish offered the contract to Circle City for pennies on the dollar compared to the rates it paid the prior broadcaster, Nexstar,” said the complaint. The court sealed other items in the case containing sensitive contract information, Dish said: “Any public harm which could conceivably be claimed to exist is outweighed by the interest of the parties in maintaining the confidentiality of the documents in question.”