EX-FCC CHIEF MARTIN ADVISING BLACK GROUP ON COMCAST-NBC MERGER

The Beverly Hills-based National Coalition of African American Owned Media has retained former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin in its battle to prevent the proposed NBC Universal-Comcast merger. (In February, the Communications Workers of America also announced that it had retained Martin to represent it in fighting the merger.) In a statement posted on its website on Thursday — the website lists Martin as its legal adviser — NCAAOM charged that not a single channel carried by Comcast is wholly owned by an African-American media company. “For decades Comcast has shut the door to African American ownership of channels,” NCAAOM President and CEO Stanley E. Washington said. Likewise on Thursday, Willis Edwards, a member of the national board of the NAACP and a senior official of its Beverly Hills/Hollywood branch, denounced Comcast’s policies towards African-American-owned media companies, describing it as “discriminatory and restraint of trade” and warned that the merger with NBC Universal would perpetuate “the exclusion of and discrimination against” African-American-owned companies.