Guest Blog: Comcast Swoops on Time Warner

CALL TO ARMS, GENTE

By Louis Perego Moreno (Tío Louie).

For many, Comcast acquiring Time Warner Cable is not a welcome prospect–– and no reason for a pity-fest since its reputation is well-deserved. This just reinforces the conglomeration of media companies in the U.S. and its monopolization, which counter a diversity of perspectives that is crucial to an ever-evolving democracy. Latinos per se, have never had a lovefest with Comcast. And this has not been enhanced with their content acquisition of NBCUniversal, despite owning Telemundo and mun2. For more information on the merger, click here.

It should be no surprise that the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger was initially challenged by over 1,100 filings. I know, because at the time Kathryn Galán as Executive Director filed an official one from the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), as well as I representing the NALIP-NY chapter as President.

Though the merger went through a year ago, the affinity towards Comcast-NBCUniversal has not endeared themselves to the Latino community with the recent cancellation of NBC Latino and dropping the NCLR's ALMA Awards for 2014. Ironically, not only have they gained the disdain of Latinos but to a broader market in which both Comcast and Time Warner are considered the most unfavorable companies in the most unfavorable industry.

Good luck to consumers and we can only hope that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be looking out for us... for a change.

Guest blogger Louis Perego Moreno (Tío Louie) is an interactive content producer and educator who for 32 years has owned Skyline Features, a bilingual multimedia and educational production company developing documentaries, television programming and advertising commercials featuring Latinos, Blacks, Women, Urban Youth and LGBT. He has trained 1,500 Latino and African American youth over 10 years to produce 70 documentary shorts. For documentary features he was the producer and director of Latina Confessions (2010) and co-producer of American Dreams Deferred (2013) on PBS.