Cable Companies unsure of who they want to be the next president

It’s a hard decision for the cable companies this year as both of the options, McCain and Obama, are critical of many of their practices. McCain has been outraged about cable channel bundling into packages for over 15 years now. Obama has taken a clear stance that he wants the FCC to impose restrictions that will prevent ISPs from modeling traffic in order to manage their networks. McCain seems to be willing to let the industry sort out itself when it comes to Net Neutrality.

Both of the potential presidents are to regulate content based on indecency, voting in June 2006 to raise the maximum FCC fine from $32,500 to $325,000 per offense. The main differentiation being that Obama has mentioned in many speeches that he finds violent or grotesque imagery to be just as or more offensive than some of the sexual content that is currently lightly regulated.

Things get a little bit fuzzier when it comes to media consolidation. It appears that McCain is okay with where consolidation currently stands, but is not prepared to allow further consolidation. Obama is currently not willing to allow further consolidation and has voiced concern that current news outlets are not fulfilling their obligations to their local markets to produce real and relevant content. It must be noted as well that they are not comparing apples to apples when it comes to media consolidation. McCain defines media more broadly as just about any voice that has influence and the medium is really irrelevant, be it cable, satellite, radio, newspaper, etc. Whereas Obama is more interested in defining media consolidation as being related to the areas of TV and radio ownership.

Multichannel has a much more in-depth article that you can peruse here.