Sen. Al Franken on CNN.
A liberal-leaning Democrat is waging a somewhat lonely but passionate fight against a mega-corporate merger. That’s the kind of thing you’re going to see talked about on the liberal-leaning cable channel MSNBC, right?
Not at the moment. Because that politician, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, is talking about the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger (New York Times, 4/11/14). And, of course, Comcast is MSNBC‘s parent company.
As we’ve noted before (FAIR Blog, 2/19/14), MSNBC mostly skipped the announcement of the merger. The only substantive coverage was on Morning Joe, where the CEOs enjoyed a victory lap. As co-host Joe Scarborough put it, “Comcast seems to be doing everything right over the past four or five years.”
Not much has changed. Franken’s questioning of company officials at a Senate judiciary committee hearing last week (4/9/14) drew notice from the likes of the New York Times (4/11/14), but it doesn’t seem to change the dynamic over at Comcast‘s cable channel, which has a political point of view that you might think would be sympathetic to Franken’s criticism—not to mention the dozens of public interest groups that have spoken out publicly against the deal.
Interestingly, CNN—which no longer has any corporate ties to Time Warner Cable—has done much more on the Comcast story, most recently on the media program Reliable Sources (4/13/14), which had also featured an interview with Craig Aaron of Free Press on the same subject (2/16/14).
But at this point, a merger of two massive media companies—which raises some fundamental questions about one corporation holding enormous power over cable, broadband and programming—isn’t generating any interest over at MSNBC. If Franken and other Comcast critics need any more evidence showing how these media giants wield their power, they don’t have to look very far.
Now that is ship wreck looking to happen. Comcast has to have one of the worst customer service records of all time, in particular, any place in which they have a ‘monopolistic contract’ with the municipalities, their customer service motto is “We ain’t Happy till your not happy”.
This cannot be allowed to happen, the NBC aquisition should not have been allowed to happen.
For the past three months, my phone service with TimeWarner has been
close to non-existent. And TV service isn’t much better. Problems with
internet occur almost daily. No problems yet with water supply–TimeWarner doesn’t handle that.
Good ol’ corporate deregulation.
Ok Padre I gotta give it to you-that was funny.And probably true.But this is where a tea party guy like me gets confused.I HATE lack of competition.It ALWAYS results in bad service and business.So I agree in one sense with Frankin.But when it comes to government monopolizing things like healthcare….then it is Ok I suppose.Nope.Sorry Charlie.High corp takes and breaks for big companies are destroying competition.The government has created the condition where only the strongest can survive.They subsidize the banks that subsidize wall street that supsidize the big corporations, and the super rich.Then to placate the left they raise the taxes on those people .A penny on the bar of gold they handed them.We need a flat tax.A fair tax.Call it what you will.Stop the collusion,control,and conditions of wealth.All government imposed.