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News Digest
Kerry Urges FCC to End Cablevision/Disney Fight
TVPredictions.com

Washington, D.C. (March 4, 2010) -- Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has asked the Federal Communications Commission to intervene in the Cablevision/Disney programming dispute that could leave three million cable viewers without Sunday's Oscar telecast.

The carriage agreement between Cablevision and the Disney-owned WABC-TV, the ABC affiliate that will air the Oscar program in the New York area, is scheduled to expire Sunday.

If a new agreement is not signed, roughly three million Cablevision viewers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will miss the Oscars. The blackout would affect both the SD and HD signals.

Kerry, who intervened in an earlier programming dispute this year between Time Warner and Fox, issued a letter yesterday to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski saying the agency should try to resolve the dispute. (After Kerry asked the FCC to get involved in the Time Warner-Fox dispute, the two sides soon came to an agreement which paved the way for Time Warner subscribers to see the national college football championship game.)

 “These are private negotiations, but there’s a public interest at stake. Its resolution matters to the consumers who take hard earned money out of their wallets each month to pay their cable bills and shouldn’t become collateral damage in wars between executives,” Kerry said in the letter.

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 The influential senator also asked the FCC to review the issue of programming negotiations, noting that viewers are left in the dark when a network and TV provider can not agree by an arbitrary deadline.

There is no word on whether the FCC will grant Kerry's request. Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who once chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, yesterday urged the FCC to stay out of the battle.

The programming dispute is the latest flap between networks and TV providers over compensation.

 “It is shocking that in these difficult economic times, ABC Disney is threatening to remove WABC unless Cablevision and its customers pay $40 million in new fees for programming that it offers today for free, both over-the-air and online," a Cablevision spokesman said yesterday, according to EW.

But a WABC-TV spokeswoman countered: "“With the help of our viewers, we’ve built ABC7 into the most watched station in the country, and have been trying for two years to get Cablevision to acknowledge the station’s value to their business."

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Phillip Swann is president and publisher of TVPredictions.com. He has been quoted in dozens of publications and broadcast outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Inside Edition, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Associated Press and The Hollywood Reporter. He can be reached at swann@tvpredictions.com or at 703-505-3064.

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