FCC Votes Comcast/Bloomberg Complaint Appeal

The Federal Communications Commission has made the call on the appeal of both Comcast and Bloomberg's challenge to a Media Bureau decision upholding Bloomberg's news neighborhooding complaint -- but it is not saying what that decision is yet.

The FCC had scheduled the item for a vote, but instead it was voted on circulation. Since it was a restricted proceeding, FCC staffers can’t talk about it until the order is released, and even after that can only refer to the order, according to one staffer, until any petitions to reconsider the full commission decision, or any legal challenges, are resolved. Comcast wanted the FCC commissioners to overturn the finding that it had not complied with the NBCUniversal deal condition requiring it to put competing news nets adjacent to "neighborhoods" containing its co-owned news nets and others. Bloomberg wanted clarification that Comcast, to fix the problem, had to "neighborhood both standard-definition and high-definition channels.” Comcast disagrees that its news groupings in channel lineups meet the FCC definition of a neighborhood, and that in any event, those groups predated the deal condition and were "not based on any discriminatory motive to advantage CNBC or MSNBC or disadvantage Bloomberg." The FCC was not expected to overturn the finding against Comcast, but it is not clear whether it has interpreted the condition as applying just to HD nets, or to the standard-definition channels in systems with only one news neighborhood and no available adjacent channels.