MEDIA : Investors Mean Business With Cox Cable Protest

It’s been more than a year since Cox Cable dropped the Financial News Network in favor of the upstart Consumer News and Business Channel, and Howard Jaffe is still angry about it.

After Cox announced the move last April, Jaffe, an investor, formed Investors Needing News for Financial News Network to protest the loss of FNN. To hard-core followers of the stock market, comparing CNBC to FNN is akin to comparing “Entertainment Tonight” to the “MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour.”

Cox, like most cable systems faced with protests over programming changes, shrugged off the complaints. But Jaffe has kept the organization alive, even if there is almost no hope of getting FNN back on the air.

Recently INN for FNN staged one of its regular meetings at a Mission Valley hotel. More than 40 people gathered in the sterile conference room. Although the group was ostensibly composed of people who, according to the newsletter, “share the common goal of seeing the Financial News Network restored to the Cox Cable Television System,” the meeting was more like an investment seminar.

Two speakers, including a technical analyst from FNN, regaled the crowd with market tips. Little mention was made of the rebellion against Cox.

“Let’s be perfectly candid,” Jaffe said later. “The people involved with FNN are investment-oriented. You have to drop a carrot in front of the audience” to get them to come to meetings.

Jaffe said he mails out about 1,000 copies of his newsletter, which includes information about similar protests around the country. The group is completely nonprofit, he said. The meetings and newsletter are free, but he occasionally “passes the hat” to help raise funds. Most of the speakers, including FNN analysts, appear before his group for free, he said.

Although the focus of the local group may have expanded to include other activities, the return of FNN is still his primary goal, he said.

“I’m just a guy out here who feels harmed,” said Jaffe. “It puts a crimp in my livelihood because I can’t utilize CNBC the way I can FNN.”

All the Cox systems agreed to drop FNN and sign with CNBC at the same time. Presumably, CNBC made an offer they couldn’t refuse. Cox program director Art Reynolds wouldn’t discuss the terms of the arrangement, but he did acknowledge it was a long-term deal. Part of the deal also gives CNBC exclusive rights to the area, meaning that when Cox expands its system, it can’t add FNN.

“There are a lot of channels with large followings that are not currently on full time,” Reynolds said. “We have to take them into consideration.”

A representative from Cox Cable’s national office, upon learning that a story was being prepared, faxed The Times a copy of a story from Business Weekly about the leader of a similar group in Hampton Roads, Va., which now accepts CNBC.

Jaffe, too, grudgingly admitted that CNBC has improved in the past year. But since entering the fray, he has seen the bigger picture. More than a comparison between two business services, he now views Cox’s decision as representative of the “arbitrary power” of the cable companies to make changes without consulting the public, a symptom of all that is wrong with the cable industry.

In his newsletter, Jaffe quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “The notion that a business is clothed with a public interest and has been devoted to the public use is little more than fiction intended to beautify what is disagreeable to the sufferers.”

He wants to keep INN for FNN together to help “alert the City Council what power the cable company has over 300,000 subscribers.”

Cox may be sympathetic, but Reynolds portrays Jaffe as something of a rabble-rouser with a small constituency.

“What we’re left with is a very small number of people who are zealous admirers of FNN,” he said. “Twenty or thirty people can’t call the shots for 300,000. . . . We try to make our decisions for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.”

Jaffe, to put it mildly, disagrees. He believes Cox’s decision to drop FNN had more to do with business and making money for Cox than any desire to do the “greatest good.”

“I’ve never gotten involved in an issue before,” he said. “This has really grabbed me as a gross injustice.”

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