Though Free Press outwardly expressed condemnation at the approval of the Comcast-NBC Merger earlier this month, they really got a lot of what they bargained for.  After their extensive lobbying blitz – with approximately 35 different FCC communiqués, including over 20 individual meetings with FCC Commissioners and their staff – it’s clear they helped shape many of the agreement’s “voluntary” commitments.

Merger decrees represent a feeding trough of sorts for the public interest group (PIG) community.  Appendix G of the Order reveals the length at which these PIGs sup, stretching nearly 60 pages of the 279 –page Order.

Appendix G wasn’t just slopped together, though.  PIGs are an organized lot.  Witness one such effort – a Free Press-attended, “funding community” event last summer, with participants there brainstorming on what they could demand from Comcast in order for the merger to go through.

Taken from published notes at that meeting, the participants wondered aloud:

…NBC/Universal is going to merge with Comcast. Can we require rules around this merger? When Comcast and Universal come together, it will diminish the incentives for the owner of that infrastructure to do local news. *What should we be asking for? A $300 million fund to incentivize public media? Trade groups to protect jobs in journalism?* We have to fight now and not look back and wonder what we should have done.

Boy, PIGs get fat, but hogs become bacon.  Yet that doesn’t stop these gluttons.  I love also the hubris of non-government officials saying, “Can we require rules around this merger…” Er, “We require”?  It shows just how corruptible and voluntary-as-a-mugging the whole process is.  Simply amazing stuff, more akin to Egyptian thuggery than American Democracy.

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I’ll be the first to admit that anti-trust law is not my strong suit.  The myriad implications of cable giant Comcast’s proposed acquisition of NBC are complexities beyond the grasp of most mortals.  Legions of attorneys will put legions of children through college with the fees that this transaction will generate.  This is the kind of stimulus that will inject much-needed capital into the private country club sector of the economy.

But beyond the regulatory and legal minutia that technically govern this proposed deal, one obscenely crass, downright offensive action by Comcast’s CEO warrants the application of withering scrutiny to the merger.

A day, one single day, after the two media giants announced their deal, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts proudly weighed in to strongly support the Senate Democrats’ health care reform bill.

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