Judge Rules Against City in TV News Broadcasting Case

A federal judge ordered the City of New York late Friday not to use its government access channels on the Time Warner cable system to broadcast either Bloomberg News Service or News Corp Ltd.’s Fox News.

The ruling is the latest in a series of legal tangles over the proposed merger of Time Warner Inc. and Turner Broadcasting System Inc.

At midnight Thursday the city began broadcasting Bloomberg News on one of its nine channels designated by the federal Cable Act for Public, Educational or Government, or PEG, use. It planned to start broadcasting Fox News at midnight Friday.

Time Warner Entertainment Co. filed a lawsuit earlier Friday to prevent the broadcasts, arguing the city was violating its free-speech rights by forcing it to carry the stations.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote issued a temporary restraining order banning the news broadcasts on the PEG stations until after an Oct. 23 hearing for a preliminary or permanent injunction.

“The city used its right to control the programming on the PEG stations to effect decisions by the plaintiff on its commercial stations, which is expressly forbidden,” the judge said.

Richard Aurelio, the president of Time Warner’s City Cable Group, said in an affidavit that the city had pressured him to run Fox News on its commercial stations first, at one point offering to swap a PEG station for a commercial station.

The city did not dispute the affidavit.

Cote ruled that it was the city’s obligation to prove it would have acted the same way without an “impermissible motive.”

The city had argued that the 24-hour Bloomberg news station, which does not air commercials, fit the city’s objective of providing education and entertainment for its residents. The judge ruled that the programming did not fit the description of government access programming.