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TagsBY LINDA MOSS
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
The bitter battle between Cablevision and News Corp. entered its sixth day Thursday, after yet another Federal Communications Commissioner blasted both sides for their impasse.
Negotiations were expected to resume today to try to resolve the dispute that has left more than 3 million Cablevision customers — including more than 900,000 in New Jersey — without three of Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV stations.
The stations that Fox yanked Saturday were WNYW and WWOR in New York, and WTXF in Philadelphia, outlets that are airing popular local sports programming and primetime hits such as "House" and "Glee." Cablevision customers have lost access to the New York Giants-Lions game Sunday, for example, and the initial National League Championship games.
Fox Deportes, Fox Business Channel and Nat Geo Wild were also pulled off Cablevision's lineup.
Cablevision and News Corp. representatives met Wednesday, but it appears that not much progress was made in the talks. The logjam in talks prompted FCC Commissioner Michael Copps to issue a statement Wednesday criticizing both the cable company and the broadcaster.
The issue is a federal regulation called retransmission consent, which permits broadcasters to ask for cash compensation from the cable and satellite companies that carry their TV stations. Fox pulled its three stations off Cablevision's lineup when the companies couldn't come to terms on how much the cable company should pay.
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"Retransmission consent has degenerated into a fight between huge monied interests to see who can milk who the most — and consumers are left holding an empty pail," Copps said in his statement. "What we are dealing with here is a fast-changing media landscape with the big players maneuvering to see how they can create new business models that will give them the upper hand over their rivals going forward.
Copps noted that the FCC's part in retransmission-consent spats has been limited, because the law confines its role to just encouraging "good faith" negotiations between private parties.
"We have interpreted this charge very cautiously," Copps said. "But the FCC is a consumer protection agency and, if the Fox-Cablevision dispute proves anything, it is that consumers are clearly not being protected. I believe the Commission should take a very serious look at whether ‘good faith' negotiations are indeed occurring. What, indeed, does ‘good faith' mean in the dog-eat-dog world of big media? If such talks are not taking place, we should move promptly to protect consumers."
Earlier this week FCC chairman Julius Genachowski also criticized Cablevision and News Corp. waging a nasty public battle, with full-page ads every day, rather than working hard to come to an agreement.
Cablevision and various lawmakers have called for the stalemate to be settled by binding arbitration, but News Corp. maintains that the FCC should not meddle in a business negotiation between two companies.
In recent days News Corp. had drawn criticism because it briefly blocked Cablevision customers from accessing Fox programming on its affiliated websites Fox.com and Hulu.com, In effect, News Corp. was trying to prevent Cablevision customers from getting Fox programming even though their cable company was no longer carrying the Fox stations.
"For a broadcaster to pull programming from the Internet for a cable company's subscribers, as apparently happened here, directly threatens the open Internet," Copps said in his statement. "This was yet another instance revealing how vulnerable the Internet is to discrimination and gate-keeper control absent clear rules of the road."
On Wednesday the American Cable Association, a lobbying group for independent cable operators, DirecTV and Dish Network cited Fox's decision to block Cablevision subscribers from Fox online content as an argument for online-access conditions to be imposed on the pending merger of Comcast and NBC Universal.
In a letter to Genachowski, the companies said that "if Fox, an entity with no affiliation to a distribution platform, was willing to deny certain viewers access to its online content in order to gain a negotiating advantage, a vertically integrated Comcast/NBCU would have an even greater incentive and ability to take similar action."
Fox owns a minority, non-controlling interest in Hulu.com. The ACA and two satellite providers said that the FCC should investigate "whether Hulu blocked subscribers unilaterally at Fox's request, or with the cooperation of Hulu's other owners."
