Comcast: NBCU Deal Benefits Just About Everybody
Company Testimony Outlines Public-Interest Commitments, Including Recent Diversity Deals
John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 7/7/2010 8:58:05 PM
The title of the House Communications Subcommittee field hearing on the Comcast/NBCU deal is" Comcast and NBC Universal: Who Benefits?"
The question refers to the proposed $30 billion joint venture, and the answer, according to Comcast senior vice president Joe Waz includes the economy, everybody who gets multichannel video service, Comcast or a competitor, broadcast viewers, independent programmers, communities and others. That would appear to include all the constituencies that have raised red flags about the deal.
That answer came in written testimony for the hearing that will be held Thursday in Chicago.
In his testimony, Waz plans to tell the committeee that competition is "fierce" among programming distributors, and that the new company would have "no ability to restrict competition or otherwise harm the public interest."
On the contrary, the deal stands to be a net plus for the public interest, he suggests, because the companies have made public-interest commitments as part of the deal, and then "clarified, enhanced and supplemented" them following Comcast and NBCU executive's last appearance before the committee Feb. 4.
Those include deals for increased diversity efforts across the company, or as Paula Madison, NBCU's chief diversity officer, will describes them in her testimony: "[A]n unprecedented series of commitments on all aspects of diversity within the two companies." In her testimony, Madison writes that those efforts were "in light of the focus by many Members of Congress on diversity issues," but on top of both companies' "solid diversiy records."
As part of Waz's written testimony, he listed 867 letters of support for the deal submitted to the FCC from such groups as various Urban League and NAACP chapters to the American Cancer Society and Children's Museum of Naples, Fla.
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