COMPANY TOWN ANNEX

Time Warner Sues New York in Cable War: Time Warner Inc. said it filed the lawsuit to prevent Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s office from airing Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and the Bloomberg News service on city-controlled cable channels. Time Warner, which controls New York’s dominant cable system, said the city is infringing on the company’s 1st Amendment and franchise rights. Time Warner has been engaged in a bitter fight with Fox over access to Time Warner’s system, which reaches 1.1 million subscribers in the nation’s largest media market. The Giuliani administration has sided with Fox, and on Friday the city aired Fox’s all-news program on one of five public-access channels it controls. On Thursday, the city began carrying the Bloomberg service on one of its channels in defiance of Time Warner.