May, 26 2015, 10:30am EDT
Planned Charter Mega-Merger Does Nothing to Benefit Customers or Boost Competition
Charter Communications on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Time Warner Cable in a deal valued at $56.7 billion. Charter also confirmed that it would acquire Bright House Networks, a smaller cable company, for $10.4 billion.
The combined mergers would grow Charter's customer base to approximately 24 million, creating the nation's second largest cable provider behind Comcast.
Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner made the following statement:
WASHINGTON
Charter Communications on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Time Warner Cable in a deal valued at $56.7 billion. Charter also confirmed that it would acquire Bright House Networks, a smaller cable company, for $10.4 billion.
The combined mergers would grow Charter's customer base to approximately 24 million, creating the nation's second largest cable provider behind Comcast.
Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner made the following statement:
"These potential mergers won't make Charter as massive as a merged Comcast-Time Warner Cable would have been but they raise similar public interest concerns, and the FCC should apply the lessons learned in its prior review here.
"The cable platform is quickly becoming America's local monopoly broadband infrastructure. Charter will have a tough time making a credible argument that consolidating local monopoly power on a nationwide basis will benefit consumers. Indeed, the issue of the cable industry's power to harm online video competition, which is what ultimately sank Comcast's consolidation plans, are very much at play in this deal.
"Ultimately, this merger is yet another example of the poor incentives Wall Street's quarterly-result mentality creates. Charter would rather take on an enormous amount of debt to pay a premium for Time Warner Cable than build fiber infrastructure, improve service for its existing customers or bring competition into new communities.
"We will carefully examine Charter's case, in particular its arguments for why this transaction is supposedly better for competition in the broadband and pay-TV markets than new investment. Charter needs to explain why this consolidation will improve competition, and a simple argument of scale won't work here. Charter's network is already superior to TWC's and that of other large cable companies, which proves that you don't need to become a colossus to succeed in this business."
Free Press was created to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media. We believe that positive social change, racial justice and meaningful engagement in public life require equitable access to technology, diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, and journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what's actually happening in their communities.
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Guterres "is particularly concerned over the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes on several locations in Syria" and has stressed the "urgent need to de-escalate violence on all fronts throughout the country," said U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.
Israel claims its invasion and bombardment of Syria—which come as the United States and Turkey have also violated Syrian sovereignty with air and ground attacks—are meant to create a security buffer along the countries' shared border in the wake of last week's fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and amid the IDF's ongoing assault on Gaza, which has killed or wounded more than 162,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
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Addressing the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and conversations it has sparked about the country's for-profit system, longtime Medicare for All advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday condemned the murder and stressed that getting to universal coverage will require a movement challenging corporate money in politics.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—a co-sponsor of Sanders' Medicare for All Act—similarly toldHuffPost in a Tuesday interview, "The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system."
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Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) 2024 roundup, which was published Thursday, found that at least 54 journalists were killed on the job or in connection with their work this year, and 18 of them were killed by Israeli armed forces (16 in Palestine, and two in Lebanon).
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Multiple journalists were also killed in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Sudan, Myanmar, Colombia, and Ukraine, according to the report, and hundreds more were detained and are now behind bars in countries including Israel, China, and Russia.
Meanwhile, in a statement released Thursday, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) announced that at least 139 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza began in 2023, and in a statement released Wednesday, IFJ announced that 104 journalists had perished worldwide this year (which includes deaths from January 1 through December 10). IFJ's number for all of 2024 appears to be higher than RSF because RSF is only counting deaths that occurred "on the job or in connection with their work."
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