Almost a year ago, comedian and successful businessman Byron Allen filed a $20 billion lawsuit against Comcast in addition to a $10 billion suit against Charter Communications as reported by the Associated Press. Now the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, will hear the case on November 13.
Allen is claiming that the two media conglomerates, which aren’t carrying his cable TV channels, are doing so based on racial bias. He has been going back and forth with Comcast in court to prove that its insistence not to carry his channels is based on the fact the he is black.
“This is historic,” says the Entertainment Studios boss of the August 15 brief filed by the feds seeking to tighten the definitions of a Reconstruction Era statute in Comcast’s favor. “Donald Trump’s DOJ and Comcast are working together to destroy a civil rights statute in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“You have one of the biggest media companies in the world, which has been beating up Donald Trump for racism, and now they are saying, we will work together to maintain institutionalized racism in America, in this amicus brief they delivered,” Allen says of the William Barr-run Department of Justice and its plan to tip the scales for Comcast.
The Los Angeles Urban League, via Twitter, as well as other civil rights groups, have called for a boycott against Comcast in anticipation of Allen’s upcoming racial bias court battle.
“We are appalled by your decision to challenge and destroy the federal civil rights statute of 1866 in the U.S. Supreme Court and do so in partnership with the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice,” the Los Angeles Urban League said several weeks ago in a letter to Comcast boss Brian Roberts and senior executive vice president David Cohen.
Now, Allen and his lawyers are going to have to prove that race was the only reason Comcast hasn’t given his cable channels distribution on its platform.
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