Justice Department Requires Six Broadcast Television Companies to Terminate - Refrain From Unlawful

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Source: DOJ News

Justice Department Requires Six Broadcast Television Companies to Terminate and Refrain From Unlawful Sharing of Competitively Sensitive Information

Proposed Settlement Preserves Competition in Broadcast Television Advertising Markets Across the United States and Requires Cooperation in Ongoing Antitrust Division Investigation

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The Department of Justice announced today that it has reached a settlement with six broadcast television companies — Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.; Raycom Media Inc.; Tribune Media Company; Meredith Corporation; Griffin Communications; and Dreamcatcher Broadcasting LLC — to resolve a Department lawsuit alleging that the companies engaged in unlawful agreements to share non-public competitively sensitive information with their broadcast television competitors.

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge the unlawful exchange of competitively sensitive information among these six broadcast television companies, their sales representatives, and other broadcast television groups. At the same time, the Department filed proposed settlements that, if approved by the court, would resolve the lawsuit’s alleged competitive harm alleged in the complaint.

“The unlawful exchange of competitively sensitive information allowed these television broadcast companies to disrupt the normal competitive process of spot advertising in markets across the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “Advertisers rely on competition among owners of broadcast television stations to obtain reasonable advertising rates, but this unlawful sharing of information lessened that competition and thereby harmed the local businesses and the consumers they serve.”

According to the complaint, the six broadcast television companies agreed in many metropolitan areas across the United States to exchange revenue pacing information, and certain defendants also engaged in the exchange of other forms of non-public sales information in certain metropolitan areas. Pacing compares a broadcast station’s revenues booked for a certain time period to the revenues booked in the same point in the previous year. Pacing indicates how each station is performing versus the rest of the market and provides insight into each station’s remaining spot advertising for the period.

Read more: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-six-broadcast-television-companies-terminate-and-refrain-unlawful