Did Comcast Give Sharpton $155K and MSNBC Gig to Help It Take Over NBC?

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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.

  • Scar

    “One such merger was behind the rise of America’s dumbest Congresswoman, Sheila Jackson Lee.” Good point. But you know what’s even more frightening than the rise of Sheila Jackson Lee? The voters that keep her in office. They are even dumber than she is. And the same scenario applies to Sharpton, who might even lose a battle of wits with Ms. Jackson. (Sharpton isn’t an elected official, of course, but his supporters are pretty naive, to put it mildly.)

  • kasandra

    This is typical Comcast behavior. It has been reported that it has given $8.6 million in donations to minority groups (60% of which went to Hispanic groups) to support its acquisition of Time-Warner (CNN, HBO, etc.) and has received 55 expressions of support for the acquisition from groups who were recipients of its largess. Over time, its Comcast foundation has given $140 million largely to minority groups. Looks like its investments are paying off.

    • PI by Nature

      Comcast is not buying Time Warner…it is buying Time Warner Cable, which, despite being headquartered in the same building as Time Warner, has had no ties to Time Warner (its former parent) since spring 2009. They are two separate and independent companies sharing no common ownership. The author needs to correct that error, because that error will continue to throw people off.

      • kasandra

        So they’re just buying the cable systems and not the other entities at least formerly commonly owned? I didn’t realize that.

        • PI by Nature

          Yes. Comcast is only buying the cable system using the Time Warner name. http://corporate.comcast.com/twctransaction

          • Pete

            Comcast looks like Enron without the offshore accounting fraud.
            Both grow/grew by gobbling up market share, but what next?

        • Pete

          That is bad enough.
          Where I live, Comcast has called “Uncle” and given up.
          Ceding market territory because you have a crappy business plan and a bad corporate culture cannot be ameliorated in the long term by acquisition.

          You can paper it over, but you cannot stave off defeat in the end.

      • Mongo66

        What does the rest of Time Warner even do? And why does it matter?

    • Bamaguje

      Now you understand why the lamestream media supports inane Black agitations like Ferguson and “Black lives matter.”

  • halevi

    “Because Sharpton got the gig on talent.” LOL

    • Scar

      Especially his command of the English language. It’s absolutely mesmerizing!

      • truebearing

        Sharpton has no frontal lobe. It looks like someone shaped his profile with a miter saw. But he does have something hidden in that huge bulbous area on the back of his head. It may be a word grinder.

  • Mongo66

    People throw the term “Orwellian” out kind of haphazardly, but I really think in this case it is deserving. To think the race hucksters were able to essentially use Newspeak in order to sway a monopoly that would make Carnegie blush is astounding. Yet another reason I dumped Comcast. I won’t let those red diaper baby’s get another cent of my money, and I recommend the rest of you do the same.

  • truebearing

    There seems to be a competition among these companies to become the official government mouthpiece. The key to the strategy is to get “too big to fail.”

    While corporate America has lunged at Obama’s fascist bait like a largemouth bass at a newborn duckling, Obama is incrementally luring them into shallower and shallower water, incrementally gaining more government control over big business…a natural progression toward total government control.

    MSNBC makes Comcast very little money in terms of direct earnings, Sharpton’s eloquence notwithstanding, but it does give them a fulcrum for leveraging deals that will make them money, but more importantly, give them more power. Of money and power, power is the more valuable currency in Obama’s Grave New World.

    • kasandra

      Oh, Comcast is already there. Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, whose family owns Comcast/NBC/Universal is a personal friend of Obama’s. They get together on Martha’s Vineyard on summer vacation and golf together other times. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

      • truebearing

        Or low places, which Obama likes to inhabit.

  • Dallasyaherd

    the left is a religion, they have little bits of logic to ween you in, but once your in it is a package you must accept completely like Christianity. Do not get it wrong the Left since Obama is a religion.