A dispute between Bloomberg L.P. and Comcast escalated on Tuesday when Bloomberg filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission accusing Comcast of favoring its own cable news channels.
In the filing, Bloomberg’s lawyers said Comcast, one of the country’s largest cable operators, had violated an F.C.C. condition on its acquisition of NBC Universal by failing to put Bloomberg’s cable business news channel in the same “neighborhood” on the cable dial as NBC Universal’s CNBC and MSNBC.
The complaint said that in two markets, Florida and Georgia, Comcast had created cable news channel “neighborhoods” that did not include Bloomberg Television; the Bloomberg channel has a fraction of the viewers of CNBC and MSNBC.
As part of the government’s approval of Comcast’s 2009 takeover of NBC Universal, Washington regulators required that the cable operator not favor its own channels.
“Comcast has argued that such moves are expensive, time consuming, cause the need for further moves as one channel displaces another and create consumer confusion,” Bloomberg wrote in its complaint. “Clearly these arguments ring hollow if Comcast is voluntarily moving news channels to create or rearrange news neighborhoods.”
In a statement, Comcast responded that Bloomberg “continues to willfully misrepresent the ‘neighborhooding’ condition in the F.C.C.’s Comcast-NBC Universal transaction” to give its own struggling channel better real estate on the cable dial.
“With respect to CNBC and Bloomberg, they’re in the same places as before we owned NBC and long before we considered owning NBC, and that’s based on CNBC being around a lot longer than Bloomberg,” a Comcast spokeswoman, Sena Fitzmaurice, said.
Bloomberg filed its first complaint against Comcast alleging favoritism in June. In December, Bloomberg was heartened by a decision by an F.C.C. judge who ruled that Comcast had discriminated against the Tennis Channel to help its own cable sports channels, NBC Sports (formerly Versus) and the Golf Network.
Bloomberg’s head of government affairs said at the time that the decision in favor of the Tennis Channel was “further proof” that “Comcast abuses its dominant position against independent programmers like Bloomberg TV.”