Ted Hearn

Catherine The Not So Great
September 2, 2008

Washington—Cablevision Systems Corp. last week named senior Federal Communications Commission official Catherine Bohigian as the company's first Washington-based lobbyist in many, many years.

The announcement by the Bethpage, N.Y., cable company rocked the industry because no one has worked more closely with FCC chairman Kevin Martin in carrying out his relentless regulatory assault on cable operators and programmers since taking office in March 2005.

“We might have to send her to reform school,” a cable industry source deadpanned.

Bohigian has known Martin since their days at Harvard Law School and their time together at the Wiley, Rein law firm. When Martin joined the FCC in July 2001 as a regular commissioner, Bohigian was among his first permanent hires. It turned out she was just the first in the Wiley, Rein army that ended up manning the Martin FCC.

Bohigian's jump to Cablevision has to rank as one of the most cynical career moves since the time Candace Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, went to work for the American Beverage Institute to fight against efforts to lower the legal blood-alcohol limit.

It can't work. It won't work. The only good that can come from the Cablevision-Bohigian hookup is that when an FCC chairman begins to lose key staff, it usually means his days in office are numbered.

Let's not forgot exactly what Martin has done to cable, with indispensable assistance from Bohigian. The list is hardly exhaustive:

-- He secretly rewrote an FCC study issued in November 2004 that had concluded that cable a la carte was a bad idea.

-- He walked away from a handshake agreement with NCTA, Comcast and Time Warner that the rollout of family programming packages would end his a la carte jihad.

-- He stripped cable's control over critical wiring in apartment buildings, affirming the identical policy that a court had previously struck down.

-- He voided exclusive contracts between cable operators and apartment building owners just a few years after the FCC gave the green light to such deals.

-- He required cable operators to carry must carry TV stations in analog and digital for three years after voting against such a policy in February 2005.

-- He extended program access rules for five years, a gift to DirecTV and Dish Network even though the two satellite providers are larger than every cable company in the U.S. except Comcast and Time Warner.

-- He imposed expensive set-top box equipment mandates on cable, making it vastly more costly for Comcast and Time Warner to reach the goal of all-digital platforms.

-- He capped cable ownership at 30% of pay-TV subscribers nationally—the same limit that a federal court kicked back to the FCC as unlawful—while letting AT&T and Verizon basically divide the country's phone market.

-- He slashed cable leased access rates to zero in an act of bureaucratic malice that a federal appeals court has now blocked and that the Office of Management and Budget has rejected as a violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act.

-- He decided to brand Comcast an Internet outlaw when all the company did was occasionally frustrate a tiny minority of customers whose massive consumption of Web porn and pirated Hollywood films was destroying the service for others.

All of these efforts were issued from Bohigian's brain because Martin is a common carrier attorney, a specialist in how the FCC and the states regulate copper telephone networks. The only thing Martin knows about cable law is what Bohigian told him.

Does Bohigian continue to take Martin’s calls for help after she joins Cablevision on Sept. 8? More than a few cable insiders would like to know the answer to that question.

James Carville famously said that if you want to find a Bill Clinton bimbo, just drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park.

It's now clear that if you want to try to convert a cable hater, just slide a fat lobbying contract under the nose of a top Martin aide.

Evidently, Cablevision thinks it has a prize catch in Catherine The Not So Great.

It's inconceivable that Bohigian, a career cable basher, will remain a Cablevision employee for long. At some point, she'll be called home to the Wiley, Rein mafia to help the Milberg, Weiss of the communications bar locate another Research In Motion to pillage or another federal agency to capture.

Posted by Ted Hearn on September 2, 2008 | Comments (1)