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Showing posts with label #AT&T buys Time Warner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #AT&T buys Time Warner. Show all posts

Thursday 8 December 2016

Michael Reagan: Trump Right to Worry About AT&T, Time Warner Merger




The Senate Judiciary committee will hold a significant hearing Wednesday on the proposed $84 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which owns CNN.

AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson will be testifying, as well as others, who support or oppose this merger.
The senators should be prepared to ask Stephenson some tough questions – because allowing this merger will have important implications for a free press and American democracy for many years to come.

During the recent election, presidential candidate Donald Trump said, "AT&T is buying Time Warner, and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few."
Since then, a number of news reports – no doubt pushed by AT&T – are suggesting President Trump will have a laissez-faire approach and the deal will go through
.
Knowing of the grassroots concerns many conservative leaders share, I doubt President Trump or Congress will rubber stamp this deal.

Trump was right when he warned of the massive concentration of media power in a few hands.
Consider: 90 percent of cable television networks are currently owned by just six companies: Time Warner (CNN), Viacom, CBS, ABC (Disney), Comcast (NBC) and 21st Century Fox.
Of these major conglomerates, only Fox gives conservatives a fair shake. New, independent networks like Newsmax TV are on the rise, but the big media still controls, dangerously, the flow of information to the public. Trump was their most recent victim.

A combination of AT&T and Time Warner will be toxic, further constricting competition and press diversity.
AT&T is a giant media company which also owns DirecTV. It was also a major corporate backer of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. It strongly opposed Trump's election.

Time Warner's CNN was nothing short of the "Clinton News Network" – a 24-hour propaganda machine spewing out anti-Trump and anti-Republican venom.

Right now, AT&T has 26.3 million pay TV subscribers through DirecTV and AT&T U-verse service – controlling about 25 percent of the U.S. cable market. It is the largest cable/satellite operator in the U.S., bar none.

By owning the largest chunk of cable home distribution, AT&T will obviously be in a position to favor their own channels like CNN, over other channels like Fox News, Newsmax and many others.

The ability for AT&T to discriminate against other cable networks that could compete against CNN or their other networks would be endless.

AT&T, which controls a huge percent of the mobile telephone market, could exempt its mobile customers from data usage charges if they stream CNN content, but streaming independent news networks like Newsmax might continue to count against high-speed data caps.