Aram Roston of The Nation writes in the Feb. 28 issue how Bloomberg L.P. has an increasingly influential lobbying effort in Washington, including backing the Coalition for Competition in Media, which was created to oppose Comcast’s acquisition of NBC.
Roston writes, “In the jockeying over the Comcast-NBC merger, Bloomberg corporate synergy also came into play. On October 19, Bloomberg Businessweek published a well-researched story exposing how Comcast had boosted its donations to politicians as it pushed for the merger. Reviewing Federal Election Commission records, Bloomberg reporters found that Comcast’s political action committee had increased its donations to politicians by more than $400,000, to a staggering $1.1 million.
“Comcast’s massive lobbying and PR campaign to push for FCC approval stood in direct tension with Bloomberg LP’s own lobbying and PR campaign around the merger.
“Bloomberg’s lobbyists quickly told the coalition members that it intended ‘to capitalize on the great Business Week/Bloomberg story this morning,’ according to an e-mail obtained by The Nation from a member of the coalition. The lobbyists wrote, ‘We’d like to flag it for reporters with a quick quote and topper.’ The coalition’s press statement said of the article, ‘These donations…are part of a calculated attempt to buy approval for a merger that offers too many dangers for consumers and media organizations.’
“There is no evidence that the Bloomberg reporters wrote the story as part of a companywide strategy or were assigned the story because of corporate influence. A Bloomberg spokeswoman says there is an ‘impenetrable firewall’ between editorial decisions and the other parts of the company. Still, it was a captivating confluence of forces: Glover Park Group, paid by Bloomberg LP, and acting with the coalition it had created on Bloomberg’s behalf, was on the warpath to distribute a news story Bloomberg Businessweek had written about the issue that was the most important pending matter in Washington for the Bloomberg brand.”
Read more here.
