He broke into the entertainment business as a teenager, playing comedy clubs in Los Angeles and making his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” at age 18. He gained fame as a host of the 1980s NBC hit “Real People” before founding Entertainment Studios in 1993. That company has grown into an empire, with a film division and nearly two dozen television properties, including the Weather Channel, which it acquired last year for $300 million.
Byron Allen offers his story as a model of African-American economic success. In recent years, he has also fashioned himself a civil rights crusader, battling what he says is the racism in corporate America with lawsuits and incendiary rhetoric.
In his $20 billion lawsuit against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, Mr. Allen has risked alienating would-be allies like Al Sharpton and the N.A.A.C.P. while drawing the Trump administration as one of his opponents.
“There’s nothing polite about this situation,” Mr. Allen, 58, said in an interview. “I’m going to be loud, proud and I’m going to make a change.”
He filed the lawsuit in 2015, contending that Comcast, after discussing a deal to carry six of his company’s channels, had turned it down in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The nation’s oldest federal civil rights law, it gives “all persons” the same right “enjoyed by white citizens” to “make and enforce contracts” and “to sue.”
The case was thrown out three times before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled last year that the district court had “improperly dismissed” it.
Comcast appealed. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, some black leaders were irked at the prospect that Mr. Allen’s lawsuit could undo longstanding civil rights protections.
At stake before the court in oral arguments on Nov. 13 was not the specifics of his dispute with Comcast, but the standard for proving racial discrimination. The justices seemed to focus on the narrow question of whether a plaintiff like Mr. Allen must make the case that racial discrimination was the main factor or just a contributing factor in the early stages of litigation.
The Supreme Court is not expected to issue its ruling until the spring. However it turns out, Mr. Allen will likely have to return to a lower court to prove that he was discriminated against.
Comcast has vigorously defended its record on diversity and refuted Mr. Allen’s claims of discrimination, arguing that the six networks he wants it to distribute are not interesting enough for its lineup or aren’t distinct from current offerings. His demand that Comcast carry all of them in high definition and the price he is asking are unreasonable, the company said.
“We feel he resorted to frivolous litigation and name-calling instead of business negotiations,” Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman, said. “We think he’s hijacking civil rights laws in an attempt to leverage personal financial gain.”
A key element of Mr. Allen’s argument centers on an agreement Comcast struck with black leaders and organizations in 2010 in order to get clearance to purchase NBCUniversal. As part of the deal, the conglomerate agreed to add four new African-American owned networks over eight years. Two of those networks were owned by Sean Combs, the mogul better known as Diddy, and Magic Johnson, the former basketball star and entrepreneur.
Mr. Allen has argued that the organizations that helped broker the deal — the National Urban League, Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network and the N.A.A.C.P. — were essentially bought off by Comcast, which has donated money to them. The agreement provided only token investment in black-owned networks, Mr. Allen said, and has been used to justify blocking black entrepreneurs from getting a seat at the table.
“I never said you don’t put black faces out there,” Mr. Allen said. “I said you don’t provide true economic inclusion.”
Comcast said it spent $13.2 billion on programming last year, but a spokeswoman declined to say what share of that went to black-owned networks.
Mr. Allen’s criticism of civil rights groups has earned him critics who say he is in it for himself more than the greater good of black people.
But there have also been unlikely supporters.
One of them is Mr. Combs. Even after Mr. Allen suggested he was used by Comcast, Mr. Combs has publicly backed Mr. Allen’s point of view and leveled his own criticism against the company for not providing proper support for his television network, Revolt.
“Our relationship with Comcast is the illusion of economic inclusion,” Mr. Combs said in a statement on Thursday.
Civil rights groups that were once the target of Mr. Allen’s barbs have also come around, signing amicus briefs supporting Mr. Allen’s position in the Supreme Court case.
Before the oral argument, the N.A.A.C.P. held a teleconference in which Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker denounced Comcast for actions that they felt were putting civil rights at risk.
“This is a major corporation that is deciding to defend themselves in this case by tearing down a significant aspect of our civil rights protections,” Mr. Booker said during the call.
Bernice A. King, a daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, have written letters to Comcast, questioning its decision to pursue the case before the Supreme Court.
If there is any indication that some black leaders remain uneasy with Mr. Allen, it is that many have avoided expressing a firm opinion on whether or not he was discriminated against by Comcast.
“If that can be established in court, that ought to be established,” said Mr. Sharpton, the activist who also hosts a show on MSNBC, which is owned by Comcast. “What I know is that I had wished that this had been settled, so that we don’t have a constitutional threat to the community.”
The 2010 agreement between Comcast and the civil rights groups failed to position the black-owned networks for success, said Paula Madison, the former chief diversity officer at NBCUniversal who helped broker the deal. An issue raised during negotiations, Ms. Madison said, was whether the company would guarantee the networks a certain number of subscribers. In the end, Comcast agreed to launch the channels, with no guarantee of how many subscribers they would reach.
Ms. Fitzmaurice, the Comcast spokeswoman, said that all of the agreements the company struck with the new black-owned channels included guarantees to distribute them to millions of subscribers.
Television networks generally get paid a fee for each subscriber, and that accounts for a vital funding stream. Although she left Comcast and NBC before the black-owned networks started, Ms. Madison said that former colleagues have told her the networks have struggled to get wide distribution.
Ms. Madison, who is black, has personal experience with the challenge of getting Comcast to distribute a black-owned network. Her family owns the Africa Channel, which Comcast has carried for more than a decade. The channel has lost subscribers in recent years, she said, despite Comcast’s assurances to help it grow.
Ms. Madison said she felt that Comcast had a duty to try to help the new black-owned networks succeed, because they were integral to the company’s gaining federal approval to acquire NBCUniversal. But at a time when streaming becomes dominant and cable operators are looking to shed channels, Ms. Madison said she believed Comcast executives would not blink if the black-owned networks went away.
“It’s laissez-faire,” Ms. Madison said of Comcast’s treatment of the channels. “It’s, ‘They want channels, we’ll give them channels.’”
Ms. Fitzmaurice, the spokeswoman, said that Comcast alone cannot be responsible for the ultimate success of the channels, which needed the buy-in of other cable providers. She also defended Comcast’s handling of the channels, saying, “We have fulfilled to the letter and beyond what we’ve promised to do.”
Comcast’s distribution of the black-owned networks varied widely. The company made Mr. Johnson’s Aspire network available to about three-quarters, or 15.5 million, of its subscribers in the second quarter of this year, according to estimates provided by Kagan, a media market research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence. Mr. Combs’s Revolt was in about 45 percent, or 9.3 million, of Comcast households.
In his statement, Mr. Combs said that Comcast had not provided Revolt with the necessary support. The network is not included in Comcast’s most affordable packages or in the markets that would help it to reach its target audience, he added.
Marc H. Morial, the president of the National Urban League and a negotiator of the 2010 agreement, defended Comcast. The deal created opportunities for minorities at the company, Mr. Morial said, including three people of color joining its board and the company tripling its contracts with minority businesses.
“We did an innovation in corporate diversity that has moved the needle to a greater extent than was moved in the past by laissez-faire, handshake agreements,” said Mr. Morial, who sits on a Comcast advisory council.
One black network owner, Yves Bollanga, praised the company, saying that it had come through with a minimum subscriber guarantee last year when it started distributing his network, Afro.
Comcast offers the channel in its 13 largest markets, Mr. Bollanga said, adding that more than 80 percent of Afro’s 11 million subscribers are through Comcast. The millions of dollars his company collects from Comcast in subscriber fees has allowed it to expand, including the construction of a 35,000-square-foot studio in Orlando, he said.
Mr. Bollanga said he had been in discussions with Comcast since 2007, and the operator had rejected him in the past. He gathered data to make his case to Comcast executives that they should carry his channel.
“Rejection should not always equate to racism,” Mr. Bollanga said. “Byron Allen is putting civil rights protections on the line.”
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiUWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTEvMjMvYnVzaW5lc3MvbWVkaWEvYnlyb24tYWxsZW4tZmlnaHRzLWNvbWNhc3QuaHRtbNIBVWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMTkvMTEvMjMvYnVzaW5lc3MvbWVkaWEvYnlyb24tYWxsZW4tZmlnaHRzLWNvbWNhc3QuYW1wLmh0bWw?oc=5
2019-11-23 10:00:00Z
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