Being mainly a political blog, the first thought on the purchase by Comcast of NBC Universal from GE is in that framework. Will Comcast look to change the direction of NBC’s flailing cable-news service MS-NBC in order to compete better with Fox and CNN? Given Comcast’s need to service a broad spectrum of consumers — and since they’d be more identified as the delivery mechanism than GE was as an absentee owner — one might wonder if they’ll be tempted to make MS-NBC more vanilla than its current hard-Left tilt.
But even before we get to that, will the FTC allow a cable delivery service to control content as well? Two years ago, that might not have been the case. In the Obama administration, with “net neutrality” being a big priority and Comcast squarely in the sights of its advocates already, it seems very, very likely that this deal will run afoul of anti-trust efforts in this administration:
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Apparently, Comcast plans to keep NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker in place. That seems to indicate that they’re not terribly concerned with MS-NBC or its disastrous performance — at least not yet.
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