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EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM: The TerryReport
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News, commentary, opinion on politics, government, books, social trends, American life, travel, cycling, books, other stuff
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Tangled up inGREEN: Will the Comcast purchase of Time-Warner Cable be approved? Not much doubt.
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There is a rather stunning matrix of connections between Comcast, which is trying to buy Time-Warner Cable, and the top levels of American government in DC. Here is a clip from the NY Times story on the issue (with a link to follow). This is how deals get done in your nation’s capital, sports fans.
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Comcast already has plenty of experience dealing with antitrust and other regulatory officials in Washington. In 2011, the company spent a year persuading officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission to approve its takeover of the entertainment giant NBCUniversal. It gained the approval in part by agreeing to certain conditions, among them a promise not to use NBC’s clout as a provider of programming to deny access to its customers by competing producers of television and films.
But many in Washington say that Mr. Cohen, a veteran of Philadelphia politics, is Comcast’s secret weapon in trying to persuade government regulators to sign off on the deal.
Mr. Cohen has close ties to President Obama, perhaps even closer than Comcast’s chief executive, Mr. Roberts, who has golfed with the president on Martha’s Vineyard.
A major Democratic fund-raiser, Mr. Cohen and his wife hosted Mr. Obama at their Philadelphia home in 2011, raising $1.2 million at an event where the president called the couple “great friends.”
Mr. Cohen also was a guest at the White House on Tuesday for the state dinner in honor of President Franois Hollande of France.
Other Comcast officials have the ability to reach deep into the regulatory agencies that will review the merger, while officials at those agencies also are very familiar with Comcast and the cable business. Shortly after the F.C.C. approved Comcast’s purchase of NBCUniversal, one of the commissioners who voted in favor of the deal, Meredith Attwell Baker, joined Comcast as a lobbyist.
The current F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, once served as the leader of the cable industry’s chief lobbying group. And the current director of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, William J. Baer, represented NBCUniversal during the Comcast deal as a lawyer in private practice.
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The underlines were added by The TerryReport. Note: Tom Wheeler was not merely a one time lobbyist for cable, he was the voice of the cable business for many years. That is how he came to prominence.
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LINK TO STORY IN THE NY TIMES:
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TerryReport comment:
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To the casual observer, these ties between government and private business trying to get approval for its actions seem like base corruption. While those connections do not appear to be inherently corrupt, they certainly are corrupting and offer the high potential that the “public interest” would be placed somewhere down the scale from “helping our friends” or whatever.
Having such close ties means that it becomes almost impossible to separate what is being done from what should be done otherwise. The closeness of the supposed regulators and the business world in this case leaps out like nuclear fire from the surface of the sun: did you miss that little eruption? It makes it seem like government and business at the highest levels are some sort of private club with an easy exchange of jobs between the two. (We are all friends here and we are all making lots of money.) In most cases, we don’t learn about these kinds of connections right upfront. They exist in varying degrees in every field regulated by the government, but this time we can see the potential conflicts at the start.
If the wrong decision is made to allow mergers that should never have happened, who can dial it back? No one. The courts don’t touch these things unless there is some sort of demonstrated malfeasance. Congress doesn’t un-do things, in 99.99% of the cases. Most of the time, if the government makes a mistake, it doesn’t even have to say it is sorry, it just rolls on to the next and the next.
Doug Terry, 2. 14.14
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to go to recent posts, nearly 300 pages of news and comments filed during the first nine months of 2013 and during the critical election year of 2012.
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to go back to prior years (500+ pages) of The TerryReport
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