FCC Sits Out Sinclair Flap
By Ted Hearn and Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 2/4/2007 7:00:00 PM
It looks like some Mediacom Communications customers had to make special arrangements to see Super Bowl XLI, as the cable company's efforts to force restoration of Sinclair Broadcast Group stations to its lineup failed last week.
In fact, despite pressure from the Senate Commerce Committee, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin has asked the other four FCC members to support a staff ruling that the agency can't legally impose binding arbitration on Sinclair Broadcast Group and Mediacom Communications, an FCC source said last Friday.
Mediacom's retransmission-consent dispute with Sinclair is a month-old now. On Jan. 6, the cable operator lost carriage of 23 of the broadcaster's stations — which include affiliates of CBS, which is carrying the Super Bowl, Fox, ABC, NBC, The CW and My Network TV — affecting some 700,000 subscribers.
Mediacom has repeatedly asked the FCC to step in and immediately order both sides into binding arbitration.
Martin's insistence that the agency lacks authority clashed with the view expressed in a letter he received last week from Senate Commerce Committee chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and the panel's top Republican, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who urged FCC intervention.
After testifying before the Senate Commerce panel last Thursday, Martin repeated his position that Congress didn't authorize the agency to force warring parties into binding arbitration when they can't agree on carriage terms in retransmission-consent negotiations.
“It's not clear to me that the commission does have the authority to order arbitration. I would say, however, though, the commission has been doing its best to try to encourage both parties to agree to binding arbitration, even by the commission's Media Bureau,” Martin told reporters, according to FCC spokeswoman Tamara Lipper.
Lipper added that Martin repeated that the agency's Media Bureau concluded that Sinclair had not engaged in bad faith negotiations, which the law prohibits.
“The commission very clearly found there has been nothing that was unreasonable,” Martin said. “Despite that, we still encourage the parties to come and agree to binding arbitration by the Media Bureau.”
The letter urged “immediate action to resolve this dispute, which could include binding arbitration.”
Mediacom chairman and CEO Rocco Commisso said the Inouye-Stevens letter supports his company's longtime contention that the FCC should intervene in the ongoing retransmission-consent dispute.
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