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NAB Head Personally Urges Karmazin to Drop Merger Plans

The head of the National Association of Broadcasters has sent a letter to Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin, asking him to end the attempt to merge Sirius with XM Satellite Radio.

In the letter, NAB president and CEO David Rehr accused Karmazin of making poor business decisions such as giving Howard Stern a multimillion dollar deal, and said that Sirius is seeking a “government bailout” for operational and financial missteps, reports Mediaweek.

The letter was prompted by Karmazin’s comments during a Lehman Bros. conference on wireless investment, says NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton. At the event, Karmazin said that the NAB’s lobbying to block the deal was disgraceful, and accused the NAB of paying various groups to publish studies that show why the merger would be bad for consumers.

Rehr did admit to paying experts, or, as he put it, “to identifying antitrust experts who have examined the proposed merger and determined that it will harm consumers and competition, and compensating these individuals for publishing their conclusions.” But, he says, more than enough consumer comments have been filed with the FCC to support his view that the merger should be denied.