Making Sense by Michael Reagan

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary committee held a significant hearing on the proposed $84 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which owns CNN.

AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson testified, and faced tough questions from senators who seemed to understand allowing this merger will have important implications for a free press and American democracy for many years to come.

During the recent election candidate Trump said, “AT&T is buying Time Warner, and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”

Since then a number of press reports —- no doubt pushed by AT&T —- are suggesting President Trump will have a laissez faire approach and the deal will go through.

Knowing of the grassroots concerns that many conservative leaders share, I doubt President Trump or Congress will rubber stamp this deal.

Trump was right when he warned of the massive concentration of media power in a few hands.

Consider that today 90 percent of cable television networks are owned by just six companies: Time Warner (CNN), Viacom, CBS, ABC, Comcast (NBC) and 21st Century Fox.

Of these major conglomerates only Fox gives conservatives a fair shake. New, independent networks like Newsmax TV are on the rise, but the big media still controls, dangerously, the flow of information to the public. Trump was their most recent victim.

A combination of AT&T and Time Warner will be toxic, further constricting competition and press diversity.

AT&T is a giant media company which also owns DirecTV. They also were a major corporate backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. They strongly opposed Donald Trump’s election.

Time Warner’s CNN was nothing short of the “Clinton News Network” —- a 24-hour propaganda machine spewing out anti-Trump and anti-Republican venom.

Right now AT&T has 26.3 million pay TV subscribers through DirecTV and ATT U-verse service —- controlling about 25 percent of the U.S. cable market. They are the largest cable/satellite operator in the U.S. bar none.

By owning the largest chunk of cable home distribution, AT&T will obviously be in a position to favor their own channels like CNN, over other channels like Fox News, Newsmax and many others.

The ability for AT&T to discriminate against other cable networks that could compete against CNN or their other networks would be endless.

AT&T, which controls a huge percent of the mobile telephone market, could exempt its mobile customers from data usage charges if they stream CNN content, but streaming independent news networks like Newsmax might continue to count against high speed data caps.

Frankly, I am usually in favor of government keeping its hands-off business activities.

But there are exceptions.

When certain businesses act like monopolies or near monopolies, have unusual access to publicly-owned or controlled distribution systems, and get preferential access to broadcast/satellite airwaves, then government has a compelling need to insure that such media companies act in a fair way to insure competition and the diversity of public opinion.

We already know that vertical integration of cable operators undermines competition.

For example, when Comcast completed its merger of NBC back in 2011, it promised that it would not favor its own channels over other channels, agreeing to a condition that would have put the Bloomberg financial news channel on equal footing with CNBC across its distribution platform.

It is well known that Comcast never honored the condition. For this and other reasons, Comcast’s recent effort to merge with Time Warner was rejected.

AT&T has not demonstrated, in my opinion, a real desire to support the public’s interest in the areas of competition, diversity and fairness.

Recently the Department of Justice sued AT&T and its subsidiary DirecTV for price fixing and illegally colluding to harm consumers.

There are many reasons why the FCC and Congress needs to handle this merger with intense scrutiny and remember this is not a business decision, but a matter that affects our democratic institutions.

President-elect Trump knows this first hand.

by Marilyn Odendahl for www.theindianalawyer.com

The Indiana Court of Appeals has overturned a man’s conviction, ruling the drugs found in his mouth should be excluded under the “fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.”

Will Thomas appealed his conviction for dealing in a narcotic drug as a Class A felony on the grounds that police lacked the probable cause to arrest, detain, move and search him after a traffic stop in Grant County.

Thomas was the passenger in a van pulled over by local law enforcement. A search of the van by a drug-sniffing dog indicated the presence of narcotics but officers did not find any controlled substances after they conducted a pat-down search of Thomas and the driver.

The driver then consented to a strip search but Thomas declined. He was taken to the Marion Police Department and while waiting in the interview room, was observed taking something from his pocket and putting it into his mouth.

Police forced his mouth open and found a small plastic baggie with 8.5 grams of heroin.

Before the Court of Appeals, Thomas argued the heroin should not have been admitted as evidence at trial because the police did not have probable cause to detain him or take him to the police station. The officers did not find narcotics in the vehicle so the decision to arrest and transport him for a strip search was unreasonable.

However, the state countered Thomas’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated. The dog sniff gave the police probable cause to search the vehicle as well as detain and take Thomas to the station.

Noting there is no Indiana precedent for these circumstances, the Court of Appeals relied on decisions from Ohio, Virginia and North Carolina. There the court found probable cause is particularized to the premises, vehicle or person to be searched.

Although the traffic stop and search of the vehicle were constitutional, the dog sniff did not provide any information about Thomas or the driver. The court held that the police engaged in a process of elimination by reasoning the drugs must be on either the driver or Thomas since nothing was found in the vehicle.

“Here, there was no contraband in the vehicle, and under circumstances like these the probable cause arising from a drug dog’s alert to a larger area like a car does not permit a fishing expedition into the pockets of each of the car’s occupants,” Judge L. Mark Bailey wrote in Will Thomas v. State of Indiana, 27A02-1602-CR-374.

Finding the police had no probable cause to detain Thomas, the Court of Appeals held his detention and transportation was unconstitutional. “The drugs obtained from him after he had been transported were thus ‘fruit of the poisonous tree,’ and should have been excluded from evidence at trial,” Bailey wrote.

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