Comcast to Bloomberg TV: Drop dead

Comcast, the cable company that is now the majority owner of CNBC, has responded to allegations from Bloomberg Television that it isn’t putting the business news shows in the same neighborhood on the dial.

Katy Bachman of Adweek writes, “In a five-page letter to Bloomberg’s legal team, Comcast general counsel Arthur Block says that Bloomberg’s claim rests on a faulty definition of what constitutes a news neighborhood.

“The dispute over the condition started May 26, whenBloomberg fired off a letter to Comcast notifying the company that it intended to file a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Bloomberg, which opposed the NBCU deal in the first place, argued that the condition, crafted to prevent Comcast from shutting out competitors to its own news channels such as CNBC, required Comcast to take Bloomberg TV out of the nosebleed section and group it with other news and business news channels.

“But in Comcast’s letter, the company says it is in compliance with the condition, which it reads as applying only to future actions that it might take after the NBCU transaction. ‘Their respective channel positions are a result of this preacquisition history, not any discriminatory motive,’ the letter said.

“Second, Comcast argues that four channels consecutively placed together do not constitute a ‘neighborhood.’  Comcast points to other distributors—including Verizon, AT&T, Dish Network, and DirecTV—group between 10 to 15 news networks together.”

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