Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal is bad news for the public

I got the news from my last Time-Warner bill, which is for a 42-inch flat screen and a second set, 23- x 36-inch flat screen. It seems they are changing all the numbers of the stations, introducing content previously shown over a period of years and still changing. I took notes when I talked to the representative about a monthly bill from TW for $142.25. RT-Today, my favorite news station at Channel 135 hadn’t been there for weeks.

The eager sellout from TW said it would be at channel 218. HBO, once 651-56, formerly HBO’s number which I watch mostly to see Bill Maher’s biting political humor was now from 510-516. Sundance would be 625 and used to be 101, showing all its old original movies. Showtime, 550-558, received the same. MLB (Major League Baseball) went from 489 to 306, and so on.

The dork on the phone said, “The long-range object was to meld all the numbers into one product, monolithic, so that TW whole enchilada can be shipped out across the nation to any station complete with programming intact and ready to run.” RT (Russia Today), which I believe has had the best worldwide coverage of breaking news and the greatest penchant to tell the absolute truth in words and video via a network of reporters with boots on the ground, was mixed in with the likes of CNN. When I went back to RT, it was a verisimilitude of itself, with people missing and the debates different, just not the same.

I also argued with the dork on the phone that in this economy, filled with wars, recessions, low wages and overwork, people have more on their minds than remembering station call numbers or where they saw their favorite programs. “It seems to me, “that you’re trying to package my TW programming and send it all over the country or the world for that matter. This is bad marketing,” I said. “I was in advertising for 20 years.

“You don’t build a brand-following with certain products (i.e., shows) then change their locations. So peanut butter is in the produce section and produce is in the cake and cookie section. People don’t literally want to play numbers games to find a Yankee ball game in or out of town. Just as they don’t want to see a Sundance serial drama like Rectitude, which ran for months until the story finally ended. Entertainment product can have a short or very long shelf-life, like the news of Iraq or the World Cup scores.”

But you see, the deal is Comcast wants to buy its chief rival, Time Warner Cable. If approved, this deal would create a television and Internet colossus like no other, another media Godzilla.

Comcast is the country’s #1 cable and Internet Company and Time Warner Cable is #2. They both regularly rank at the bottom of the barrel in customer-service surveys. Put them together and you get one subpar giant offering badly rated service to two-thirds of U.S. homes.

This deal would give Comcast control of a third of the U.S. pay-TV market and half of the triple-play market for video, voice and Internet service. Argh! Comcast already owns NBC, Universal Studios and tons of cable networks and popular websites. The merger will bring us one enormous company that controls marquee television and movie content, as well as the primary vehicles—a major television broadcast network, a major cable system operator and a major broadband Internet access provider—for distributing that content.

That means for most of the country, Comcast could control even more of what you see and how you see it. But what about cable content as free speech? Isn’t that a monopoly screwing with the First Amendment?

This deal isn’t just about dollars. It’s also about democracy. Comcast already wields a great deal of power in Washington: The company spent more than $18 million on lobbying in 2013 alone. The merger would give Comcast an even better shot of ensuring that future communications policies favor its bottom line. How much is enough? Is it enough to kill dissent, could this piece run on it, and have its content played around with or repositioned? Who gets heard, what gets shown or canned, reported, criticized or praised.

Putting this much power in the hands of one mega company is dangerous. This deal would definitely lead to less consumer choice, less diversity and much higher cable bills. Ain’t that a kick in the head? Isn’t this is a media monopoly? For instance:

Last night, my wife was having dinner with an old friend of hers, whose husband recently passed. My son was out somewhere. I had our apartment to myself. So I thought I would research the new numbers and see what they had to offer. I ended up with a 1970s Bruce Springsteen Concert that provided more noise than music, with a 70s nostalgia audience, and musicians giving their best ass-kissing speeches to the Boss. Ugh!

I turned to what looked to be an adventure story. A bride is abducted from the store in which she’s buying a wedding dress, but don’t worry she’s abducted to a stone prison cell with an iron gate. From another storyline, a handsome funky-looking guy with a beard comes to rescue her. The abductors lock him too in the cell. But his rage rises and he turns into a werewolf and bites the hand of the guy with the key in the lock and with shear strength pushes the gate open and beats the abductor to a pulp. Had enough? Well, it’s just me. What you’re gonna get is a lot worse and worser. Take my word for it. I ended up turning on my BOSE radio station with a palm-size remote to listen to my favorite, independent jazz station, WGBO, at 88.3 on the dial. So God bless America, jazz, but not the Comcast-Times Warner boondoggle.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.