dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

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Brian Roberts, 54, chairman and CEO of Comcast, a cable and broadband provider that announced on February 13 its intention to take over Time Warner Cable in a $45 billion deal, seeks to control the cable services of more than 32 million American homes, which would make him the unchallenged leader in the field.

The merger — which still needs congressional and regulatory approval — marks the latest step in the Roberts family’s long road from a modest start by his father and two Jewish partners in Tupelo, Miss. 50 years ago, to becoming America’s largest provider of home media content.

“Brian’s commitment to religion and Jewish causes is like every other thing he does: It is extremely personal and low-profile,” Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor, told the Forward. Roberts, he added, “does not carry these things on his chest.

But it is part of his company’s DNA. Comcast was established in 1969 by Roberts’s father Ralph and his two Jewish partners, Daniel Aaron and Julian Brodsky. During a poker game, Ralph Roberts had heard about a small cable company in Tupelo looking for investors and the three partners decided to step in.

Roberts made his first visit to Israel for the 1981 Maccabiah Games. Four years later, again representing the United States at squash, he proposed to his future wife Aileen Kennedy in Israel, and in later years both of their daughters played in the Maccabiah Games.

“We are a mixed marriage, so our kids were raised with a little less Judaism than I was raised with,” Roberts said in video produced by Maccabi USA, “and so I was always looking for a way to connect them in a way that felt natural.”

He has a real strong affinity to Israel,” said David Pudlin, a Philadelphia lawyer and Roberts’s squash partner, “and he is a great squash player.”

Described by all as low key and media shy, both calculated and aggressive, Roberts has led Comcast into a series of acquisitions and mergers that have turned the family business into a media giant. The company took over the shopping TV channel QVC, then a chunk of AT&T broadband subscribers, and in 2009 bought the majority holding of NBCUniversal.

Comcast has supported politicians from both parties, as long as they were on the side of its business interests, but Roberts personally has leaned more Democratic. He was a member of the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and hosted President Barack Obama at his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

Comcast’s political activity, however, is entrusted to Executive Vice President David L. Cohen. A close confidant of and former top aide to Rendell, Cohen is now in charge of Comcast’s greatest challenge — convincing regulators and Congress that the series of mergers and acquisitions does not make the Philadelphia company into a media monopoly. As described in a recent New York Times article, much of Comcast’s success in Washington has to do with Cohen’s policy of helping out communal and ethnic organizations and in return, gaining their support when needed on the Hill. In one such case, Comcast gave $180,000 to the Baltimore-based Elijah Cummings Youth Program in Israel. In 2010, the organization sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission supporting Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal.

Cohen is a board member of the Philadelphia Jewish federation and a donor to many local and national Jewish causes.

Another key Jewish officer in the Comcast empire is Arthur Block, the company’s senior vice president and general counsel.

On Capitol Hill they will meet opposition led by Senator Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, who in the past grilled Roberts over the NBC deal. Franken has already expressed his “serious reservations” about the Time Warner Cable merger and has called the FCC to apply careful scrutiny before giving it the stamp of approval. He, too, is Jewish.

https://forward.com/news/193521/brian-roberts-jewish-roots-and-outsized-ambition-d/?p=all

Explains why Franken was banished.