The Resistance Liberal Lawyers Helping Trump Take Over the Media

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The Resistance Liberal Lawyers Helping Trump Take Over the Media<br>Liberal anti-Trump lawyers are helping Trump engineer a takeover of the media through a corrupt merger of local broadcasters Nexstar-TEGNA. Oh and they are violating a judicial order.<br>Matt Stoller<br>Jul 24, 2026

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To understand what is likely to happen in corporate America, increasingly you have to think like a criminal. And increasingly, that’s what I’m finding fancy corporate lawyers on both sides of the aisle do for a living.

Yesterday, I read a filing from some state enforcers on a $6.2 billion merger between two companies called Nexstar and TEGNA, which together would own hundreds of local broadcast stations. It is one of the craziest legal filings I’ve ever read, even surprising me in terms of the brazenness and disregard for the law. At the same time, I’m seeing in a different case - the Paramount-Warner merger - a possible scheme based on Supreme Court corruption that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.<br>Here’s what happened. We’ll start with Nexstar-TEGNA, two companies that, while not well-known, were actually at the heart of Trump’s attempt to have comedian Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the air. That moment was a message to the press to give the administration positive coverage, or face retribution. But to understand this attempt to creating a censorship machine, we have to understand how our media companies make money.<br>Local broadcasters operate in a regulated environment, and seek to make profits based on their regulatory framework. Specifically, the American broadcasting system splits national broadcasters from local affiliates. Disney owns ABC, which offers Jimmy Kimmel’s show, as well as sports and national news, but it is carried by local affiliates, your KXTV local ABC channel in Sacramento, for instance. Those local affiliates have some power over whether to carry national ABC content, and offer their own local news, weather, traffic, syndicated shows, and so forth.<br>And lest you think that streaming has made this system obsolete, think again. FCC regulations require all cable-TV style systems, including streamers, to buy must-have content from local broadcast affiliates. As Nexstar noted, “Big 4 broadcast networks carry the nation’s most- watched programming by a significant margin (including the substantial majority of [NFL] games).”<br>Nexstar and TEGNA companies are major players here, having rolled up much of the market. If combined, Tegna and Nexstar would own quite a lot - 265 television stations in 44 states, reaching 80% of households. With their market power, they have been able to force up prices for pay-tv across the board, for pay-tv on cable and streaming, up roughly 2000% since 2010. When they acquire two stations in the same market, they not only hike costs, they also lay off local tv journalists.<br>Now, it’s illegal to let these companies merge, if for no other reason than they have overlapping stations in lots of markets. Enter corruption. Last September, both companies demanded that Disney get rid of Jimmy Kimmel, or they would refuse to carry ABC programming. Why? Well, they wanted favorable treatment from the FCC and the Antitrust Division, who would have to approve this merger.<br>To give you a sense of how illegal this deal is, in Trump’s first term, his agencies did not allow Nexstar to buy what it wanted, and this deal is much much bigger. Yet in February, just a few months after these companies did Trump the favor of getting Kimmel temporarily pulled, Trump supported their combination.

As with Ticketmaster, some state attorneys general on a bipartisan basis chose to challenge the merger. And so did DirecTV, because it’s a pay-TV operator that has to buy from Nexstar and TEGNA, and doesn’t want much higher costs.<br>But in a brazen move, the FCC and Antitrust Division approved the deal, and within minutes, Nexstar and TEGNA closed their transaction. They paid out golden parachutes to executives and began integrating the lines of business, so as to force any judge trying to oversee the deal to have to granularly manage an unwinding and, in the hopes that a judge would find that too annoying to deal with and simply let the merger happen. While aggressive and dirty tricks are common, the explicit nature here is novel, because the goal of these companies is not just dismissive of enforcers, but of courts as well.<br>But the judge in this case, Troy Nunley, wasn’t fooled, and agreed with the states and DirecTV. He issued an injunction in April ordering Nexstar to hold the two companies separate so as “to not influence the management of the held-separate TEGNA business unit” while the case goes to trial. Basically, he said these are independent competitors and will have to be treated that way unless they can overcome his skepticism about their violation of anti-merger statutes.<br>Ok, so what did...