Does Comcast Own Washington?

By John Cassidy, The New Yorker
16 February 14
 

ell, the initial verdicts on the Comcast-Time Warner merger proposal are in, and they are largely negative. The Consumers Union: “This has the potential to be a very bad deal for consumers.” TheFinancial Times: “Too often, the Federal Communications Commission has let itself be bought off.… This time it should steel itself to say no.” The former F.C.C. commissioner Michael Copps: “This is so over the top it ought to be dead on arrival at the F.C.C.”

With big cable companies already hugely unpopular, someone unfamiliar with Washington might assume that the merger has no chance of getting regulatory approval—but that would be an error. Comcast is an extremely well connected company, and it is going up against a set of politicians and regulators who are compromised by their prior dealings with the company, or with other big players in the cable industry.

As a case study in antitrust law, the proposed merger raises some interesting issues, which I’ll return to in another post. But the deal also raises some big political questions, the most basic of which is: Does Comcast own Washington? In the past fifteen years, since it became the biggest cable company in the country, Comcast has invested a lot of time and effort in currying influence with the right people.

Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chief executive, is a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which was set up in 2011, and, according to the New York Times, he played golf with the President on Martha’s Vineyard. In 2000, Roberts served on the host committee for the Republican National Convention, in Philadelphia, but he and Comcast have been big givers to the Democrats since Obama took office. Roberts was even one of the donors to President Obama’s 2013 inauguration.

Other Comcast executives also have close ties to the White House, particularly David Cohen, its chief lobbyist. Here’s how Edward Wyatt, of the Times, described Cohen on Friday:

A major Democratic fund-raiser, Mr. Cohen and his wife hosted Mr. Obama at their Philadelphia home in 2011, raising $1.2 million at an event where the president called the couple “great friends. 

Mr. Cohen was also a guest at the White House on Tuesday for the state dinner in honor of President Francois Hollande of France.

While paying a lot of attention to the executive branch, Comcast has been careful not to neglect its friends at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Between 2001 and 2012, according to an analysisby MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks money and politics, Comcast gave about $6.7 million to members of the House of Representatives. It paid particular attention to those members who sit on the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, which has oversight of the F.C.C. Greg Walden, the Oregon Republican who heads the subcommittee, has received fifty-three thousand dollars from Comcast, and John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who also sits on the subcommittee, and who chaired the larger Energy and Commerce Committee during Obama’s first term, has been the recipient of more than a hundred thousand dollars in donations from Comcast.

Doubtless, the members of the subcommittee will ignore these donations and focus exclusively on the public interest when they eventually gather to consider the merger. On Thursday, the day it was announced, Walden issued a public letter calling on the Government Accounting Office to investigateCover Oregon, his local Obamacare insurance exchange, which he claims has been badly run. On Friday, he even went on Fox Business News to discuss Cover Oregon. But he was evidently too busy to schedule hearings on the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, or even to comment on it.

After my post yesterday, I hardly need to remind you that Comcast also has friends at the F.C.C. itself, including its new chairman, Tom Wheeler, the former head of the National Cable Television Association. But I am grateful to Edward Wyatt for reminding me of a detail that I had forgotten. In February, 2011, the F.C.C. voted four to one in favor of allowing Comcast to merge with NBC Universal, with the aforementioned Michael Copps as the only dissenter. Shortly after that, one of the four commissioners who had given Comcast the nod, Meredith Attwell Baker, a former Bush Administration official, left the agency and joined Comcast as a senior lobbyist, working with David Cohen, the Obama fund-raiser.

It’s a wonderful town, our capital.