A federal appeals court has rejected an Indianapolis broadcaster’s claims that DirecTV and Dish Network racially discriminated against his company by declining to pay retransmission fees to carry its stations.
Circle City Broadcasting and its majority owner, DuJuan McCoy, had asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a U.S. District Court’s decision last year to throw out the cases without a trial. (The news was reported by Indiana Lawyer.)
Circle City had sued the satellite TV companies back in 2020 because they refused to pay retrans fees after Circle City bought Indianapolis TV stations WISH and WNDY from Nexstar Media Group. McCoy charged Dish and DirecTV were discriminating against the stations because they were now part of a Black-owned business.
“For their part, Dish and DirecTV presented clear evidence of a race-neutral reason for their contractual negotiating decisions — Circle City’s lack of bargaining power,” the 7th Circuit ruled.
According to court documents, when asked by McCoy why he was offered lower rates than competitors, a representative for Dish responded that “extremely large groups, like Nexstar, are able to extract money for stations that [multichannel distributors] would not pay for otherwise, simply by withholding consent for the stations [multichannel distributors] really do want,” a practice Dish calls an “industry norm.”
