The Democratic National Committee announced Friday that it dropped New Hampshire television station WMUR as a sponsor for the party’s presidential debate next week over the network’s unwillingness to negotiate with a local union.
WMUR and its parent company Hearst have for months refused to negotiate with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1228. The union accused the station of trying to strip 11 workers’ pensions after they unionized, as Politico first reported. WMUR is the most prominent TV station in the early voting state.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and New Hampshire party chair Ray Buckley announced the decision in a joint statement.
“Regrettably, as a result of WMUR’s unwillingness to move forward on scheduling negotiations between the Hearst Corporation and Production Department employees represented by IBEW Local 1228 prior to the debate, we will no longer include WMUR as a co-sponsor of the debate, and their talent will not be participating in any way,” they wrote in the statement.
National party officials expected the station to resolve the situation before the debate, which will be broadcast Saturday on ABC. Labor organizers had earlier threatened to picket the debate, which would have provided a far from palatable backdrop for the Democratic debate.
Not sure how prominent WMUR really is. Everyone up here is on cable or satellite. It is the only way we really get any TV and about the only thing I use WMUR for is on-line weather. All the rest of my network viewing, what little I or my family does, is out of Boston.
Good JOB…DEMS.
Have the criteria for including candidates been announced?
I Googled that and didn’t find anything.
There is only three. Its not the issue that is on the republican side, we have plenty of time for all three to get their points across.
Now if we could just schedule them at a time when people would actually watch them…
I gotta wonder how many of those union guys, whom I assume, because they are working for a TV station and are blue collar members of IBEW, which gets great salaries for its members, are actually Dems. I am going to guess that most of the are Trump supporters, and if that is the case, who cares about crossing their picket lines.