Court Denies Charter Bid to Dismiss Entertainment Studios Racism Suit
Charter Communications' bid to have a lawsuit alleging racially based discrimination in its program carriage decisions tossed was rejected. In a ruling (in Pacer) entered Tuesday U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Judge George Wu said when there are two…
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plausible explanations for behavior, one put by the defendant and the other the plaintiff, a compliant can be dismissed only when the defendant's explanation makes the plaintiff's implausible. He said his ruling was based on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' Eclectic Properties East v. Marcus & Millichap. Charter argued it had valid business reasons for not carrying Entertainment Studios Network (ESN) content (see 1606170001). Wu also said the ESN arguments, when viewed in total, validly state a claim and it's entitled to proceed on discovery. But Wu upheld Charter's move to dismiss the co-plaintiff National Association of African American Owned Media for lack of standing, agreeing with the cable operator that if ESN is NAAAOM's sole member, NAAAOM participation is unnecessary. Charter in a statement Wednesday said the suit "is a desperate tactic that this programmer has used before with other distributors." A similar ESN/NAAAOM complaint against Comcast was tossed out earlier this month (see 1610060002).