Comcast is widely considered the worst company in America. Certainly the worst cable company in America. And yet its CEO golfs with Obama and NBC is willing to tell any lie to help his administration.
but just how low down did Comcast go when it was trying to merge with NBC? As low as the gutter.
Between 2008 and 2010, Comcast’s corporate foundation donated more than $3 million to 39 minority groups that wrote letters to federal regulators in support of the NBC deal. Comcast and NBC Universal also worked out an agreement with advocacy groups guaranteeing increased “minority participation in news and public affairs programming”—so long as the deal went through. And in 2009 and 2010, Comcast gave $155,000 to an organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who ended up endorsing the merger.
…At MSNBC, which Comcast also owns, Sharpton landed a talk show. A spokeswoman for Comcast says the company is a “long-standing supporter” of minority groups and had nothing to do with Sharpton’s hiring.
Because Sharpton got the gig on talent.
Staffers in the Washington bureau were under pressure to book minorities on their shows so Comcast and NBC could make good on their promises to civil-rights groups. Employees compiled data on the ethnic makeup of on-air guests to ensure they were in compliance, according to a person familiar with this research. While more diversity on television is, of course, a good thing, this corporate edict had less to do with making high-quality TV than with pleasing the institutions journalists are supposed to be out covering.
One of the dirty little secrets of the big communications mergers and buys is how they used minority groups to approve and support the deals, particularly the always-for-sale Congressional Black Caucus.
One such merger was behind the rise of America’s dumbest Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee.
AT&T has poured money into Sheila Jackson Lee’s campaign chest and cut six figure checks to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the Congressional Black Caucus Political Education and Leadership Institute. In return the CBC endorsed the AT&T and T-Mobile merger, along with the Communications Workers of America, which is also a Jackson Lee donor. An added bonus to the merger will be AT&T’s unionization of T-Mobile’s workforce, with the dues kicked back to the campaigns of Democratic politicians.
Now that Comcast is trying to take over Time Warner, minority signatories are once again signing on to the creation of the worst cable company in the universe.





















