CBS censors CNET over Dish Hopper award: the full story

In a case that the country’s largest TV broadcasters say is pivotal for their business, a federal appeals court denied Fox’s request to shut down Dish Network’s automated ad-skipping DVR service, according to a story in The Hollywood Reporter.

This was just the latest attempt by TV broadcasters to litigate against companies that enable people to create copies of TV shows for their personal use, which numerous federal courts have ruled is within the law. With this complaint and in the lawsuit TV programmers brought against Aereo, a web TV startup, the strategy is to accuse the companies, and not their customers, of actually making the copies. In both cases, an appeals panel rejected the claims.

News Corp.‘s Fox Broadcasting unit, rebuffed in earlier efforts to block Dish’s Hopper DVR for skipping commercials, now seeks an injunction to block the new Hopper with Sling for delivering live and recorded TV to computers, phones, and tablets over the internet.

According to Bloomberg, Fox sought a preliminary injunction yesterday in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging the Hopper’s Sling features breach Fox’s license agreement with Dish and infringe the network’s copyrights on its programming. The Hollywood Reporter notes that this is an amended version of Fox’s earlier lawsuit against Dish in the same court, with the same judge.

The Consumer Electronics Association has issued a press release awarding the Dish Hopper with Sling DVR the coveted “Best of Show” award at CES 2013. As The Verge reported and CNET later confirmed, the Hopper had been voted to win CES’s top award by the editors of CNET, before executives at CNET’s parent company CBS vetoed the vote due to CBS’s ongoing lawsuit against Dish.

Yesterday, CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro sharply criticized CBS’s editorial interference with CNET’s technology coverage in an op-ed in USA Today, and announced the CEA would be “considering [its] legal options under [its] agreement with CNET.” Today, the CEA officially ended CNET’s role in choosing the Best of Show award at CES, and announced it would issue a request for proposals from other potential partners. CEA senior VP Karen Chupka writes that the CEA is “concerned [CNET’s] new review policy will have a negative impact on our brand should we continue the awards relationship.”

Before an all-hands meeting with CBS corporate on Wednesday, CNET staffers reportedly believed that their parent company might reverse its policy banning reviews of the Hopper DVR and Aereo. Instead, as Jim Romenesko reports, CBS was adamant. Not only could CNET’s reviews team not cover the Hopper DVR, reporters apparently could not write positively of the product at all.

This account appeared in media journalist Jim Romenesko’s blog, supported by interviews of multiple CNET staffers. It suggests that CNET and its parent company are still at odds over what constitutes editorial interference. Problems that seem minor to CBS are major for CNET. It offers no resolution of the problematic distinction between news and reviews that CBS is trying to introduce following its controversial awards ban of Dish’s Hopper DVR at CES. It also makes what readers can expect from CNET’s coverage of Dish and Aereo still something of an open question.

This week, live-TV startup Aereo released an update to its Roku app, adding a new visual interface and enabling full control with the Roku remote. It’s a relief to customers of both Roku and Aereo, who previously could only navigate the Aereo channel through an iOS app. But CNET’s story on Aereo’s update is more significant for what’s built up around that small bit of news: an announcement that CNET is barred from reviewing Aereo and its products due to parent company CBS’s lawsuit with Aereo.

CNET’s ban on Aereo reviews is not a surprise. Two weeks ago at CES, CBS banned Dish from consideration for a CNET award and future reviews coverage. The Verge later learned that Dish’s Hopper with Sling DVR had in fact won CNET’s award for Best In Show at CES, and that CBS corporate pulled the plug, over CNET editors’ objections.

Dish may have found itself on the wrong side of CNET’s “Best of CES” award after parent company CBS forced the editorial staff of the website to revote, but that hasn’t stopped Dish from making the most out of the controversy. The company originally broke the news in a press release, and now it has awarded itself the title that it had taken away. Dish’s promotional site for the Hopper with Sling says the set-top box was “named best in show” with a big, fat asterisk next to it. Here’s what Dish has to say:

Are news and reviews subject to different ethical standards? That appears to be the message from CBS in response to Dish’s controversial Hopper DVR. Official CBS policy now bans CNET from reviewing products implicated in lawsuits, but claims CNET still has complete editorial independence over “actual news.”

On Monday, CBS issued a statement to the New York Times calling the ban on the Hopper “an isolated and unique incident in which a product that has been challenged as illegal.” A spokesperson noted that not only CBS but other media companies had brought suit against Dish. “CBS has nothing but the highest regard for the editors and writers at CNET… and, in terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100% editorial independence, and always will.” (Spokespeople for CBS, CBS Interactive, and CNET did not return requests to respond directly to The Verge for comment on this story.)

CNET has confirmed what we reported this morning: the commercial-skipping Dish Hopper had been chosen for its “Best of CES” award before being overruled by parent company CBS. In a post, Editor-in-Chief of Reviews Lindsey Turrentine describes the site’s battle over the Hopper, which is the subject of a lawsuit by CBS and other networks. The Hopper, she says, was chosen “because of innovative features that push shows recorded on DVR to iPads,” but CBS vetoed both the original vote and a “transparent statement” about it.

Turrentine doesn’t actually denounce the decision to strike the Hopper from awards and reviews, and she defends her decision to stay with the site, unlike reporter Greg Sandoval, who resigned over the decision. Nonetheless, she says that “the circumstances demanded more transparency and not hurried policy,” apologizing for not disclosing that Dish won the original vote. Despite her assertion that she will attempt to prevent similar future incidents, though, there’s little indication that she or anyone else at CNET will be able to overrule CBS going forward.

On Friday, news broke that CNET had been forced by its parent company CBS to remove the Dish Network’s Hopper set-top box from its “Best of CES” awards due to ongoing litigation between the two companies. CBS has been battling the Dish Network in court over the Hopper’s ability to skip past commercials automatically (NBC, ABC, and Fox are also taking action).

CBS Interactive representatives told The Verge that the Hopper with Sling had been “withdrawn from consideration” from the “Best of CES” awards due to CBS’s lawsuit with Dish; that the ban on coverage is limited only to specific products implicated in ongoing litigation with CNET’s parent company; and that the ban only applied to product reviews and that news coverage would be exempt. That policy appears to have been hastily put in place. Prior to the move Friday, CNET had reviewed the Hopper and written extensively about the device.

Chalk it up to the conflicts of being a giant media company. CNET made Dish Network’s acclaimed but controversial Hopper with Sling DVR a finalist in its “Best of CES” awards. But CNET’s parent company CBS objected, because it’s suing Dish over the commercial-skipping feature in its DVRs.

The Hopper with Sling was disqualified from CNET’s awards shortly before the winners were announced. CNET attached a disclaimer to its list of award finalists: