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Media Errs Again on McCain-Dolan
January 1, 2008

The story has been written three times: First by the Associated Press in March 2005, then by U.S. News & World Report in May, and then by The Washington Post on New Year’s Eve. And each story was highly inaccurate.
 
The claim in each story was this: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) performed political “favors" for Cablevision Systems chairman Charles F. Dolan because Dolan gave $200,000 to a McCain-backed political foundation called the Reform Institute.
 
And the Cablevision money flowed McCain’s way, so the stories go, entirely because Dolan and McCain were political allies on the a la carte sale of cable channels like ESPN, Disney and C-SPAN as an alternative to the mega-packages consumers are offered on a take-it-or-leave it basis.
 
Yet each story was fundamentally flawed for at least one reason: McCain wants Congress to pass a law, or the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a regulation, that would force cable operators to provide every cable channel on an a la carte basis.
 
Dolan, a cable industry pioneer who helped launch HBO, has never supported cable a la carte by government fiat.
 
Somehow, the fact that McCain and Dolan were far apart on the a la carte issue didn't stop the AP, U.S. News and the Washington Post from reporting that McCain kept trying to provide Dolan with favors he didn't want. Which is disappointing given that McCain is surging in the race for the GOP presidential nomination and shouldn’t have to spend time quelling rewrites of a half-baked AP story almost two years old.
 
The first alleged McCain “favor” to Dolan was an invitation four years ago to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on cable programming issues while McCain was the panel’s chairman.
 
A week later, the Reform Institute -- described by the Post as “a tax-exempt group [McCain started] that advocated an end to outsize political donations” -- hit up Dolan for $200,000. Dolan kicked in the first $100,000 a few months after his Senate appearance.
 
In terms of context, the Post suggested that Dolan got a seat before McCain’s panel because he testified “in favor of a position backed by McCain,” meaning a la carte mandates.
 
But that is not what Dolan did. Instead, he spoke out three issues:
 
-- Dumping the law that requires cable subscribers to buy local TV signals before any other programming.
 
-- Stopping programmers from forcing cable operators to license more channels than they want.
 
-- Banning TV stations from tying access to their signals to cable carriage of non-broadcast programming.
 
Nowhere in Dolan’s prepared testimony did he use the words a la carte.
 
The second alleged McCain “favor” came in May 2004 when McCain sent a letter to the FCC reciting his support for cable a la carte. The letter quoted two cable executives, including portions of Dolan’s Senate testimony, “who proclaimed the merits of a la carte pricing …”
 
But McCain's letter did not say that Dolan agreed with him that the time had come for a la carte regulation. Obviously, he couldn't because it would not have been the truth.
 
Perhaps, McCain got the idea in his head that Dolan was for government-imposed a la carte because at the time Dolan was taking heat for wanting to sell a la a carte an expensive new sports network that had the cable rights to New York Yankees baseball games.
 
Citing the AP story, the Post said Dolan gave the second $100,000 to the Reform Institute soon after McCain sent out this letter to the FCC.
 
The AP story suggested that McCain’s letter to the FCC was some kind of an out-of-the-blue plug for Dolan and Cablevision.
 
Actually, McCain had an independent reason for writing the FCC. The agency, at the request of the bipartisan leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had just agreed to take a pros-and-cons look at the a la carte issue. In comments filed at the FCC in August 2004, Cablevision did not advocate a la carte mandates.
 
News stories that claim a financial quid pro quo need to be hog tight, horse high and bull strong. The McCain-Dolan accounts in the varsity media had just the bull.

Posted by Ted Hearn on January 1, 2008 | Comments (0)