Sens McCaskill, Portman Press Cable on Fees, Promotions

Veteran cable critics Sens Rob Portman (R-OH) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) have started out the new Congress by pressing Charter and Comcast on fees and promotions. That came in joint letters to Charter president Thomas Rutledge and Comcast president Brian Roberts dated Dec 23. Sens Portman and McCaskill head up the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held a hearing on cable fees and customer service last year in conjunction with a report it issued at the same time. Both the report and the hearing were rough on pay-TV providers, who pledged to do better.

In a joint release Jan 3, Sens McCaskill and Portman said they were pressing Charter and Comcast over what they characterized as "the misleading placement of fees on customers’ bills, and inadequate advertising disclosure for service promotions." They want more information on both from the companies. Citing the hearing in the last Congress, they said in letters to the two companies, as they signaled in the hearing, they thought that using separate line items like the "broadcast TV surcharge" for retrans fees or "Regional Sports Network Fees" charge for the cost of that programming "obscured" the real cost of programming when it was grouped with regulatory fee line items and charges.