Van Hollen's Rockville Office Puts Up Fight Against Nonstop Fox News
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For more than four years, every visitor and tenant of one of the tallest buildings in downtown Rockville, 51 Monroe St., was greeted with the Fox News channel on large, flat-screen televisions mounted near the elevators of the ground and first floors. The channel never changed.
To those who complained, building management offered a standard answer: Only one channel was available on the sets. This assertion went unchallenged until the district office of Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a tenant on the fifth floor, got involved.
As part of the renegotiation of its lease last fall, the district office insisted that the televisions be tuned to different news channels, not exclusively Fox, said Joan D. Kleinman, the office's district director. It's not written in the lease, which took effect in January, but it was brought up in negotiations, Kleinman said.
Management appears to have relented.
A building employee said yesterday that the channels are rotated weekly. Now, on some days, tenants and visitors can watch CNN while waiting for the elevators. On other days, they can watch a local news station. And still, on other days, Fox News appears.
The building, also home to The Washington Post's Montgomery County bureau, is owned and managed by Washington Real Estate Investment Trust. The building property manager did not return calls for comment Friday.
-- Aruna Jain
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