The future of local TV news has taken a Trumpian turn

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Not long ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission created a rule designed to prevent monopolies: no company could broadcast to more than 39 percent of all TV households in the United States. But then Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became Chairman of the FCC and immediately launched a deregulation initiative called “Delete, Delete, Delete”, in which Carr vowed to get rid of “every rule, regulation, or guidance document” that imposes an “unnecessary regulatory burden” on companies. And within a few months, Nexstar, which already owned more than 200 stations nationwide and had reached its ownership limit, announced that it had reached an agreement to buy its rival, Tegna, for an estimated $6.2 billion – something that could only happen if Carr agreed to change the FCC’s rules.

If you ask Nexstar why it’s pursuing a merger that would give it control of more than 80 percent of the market, it will point to Big Tech as the culprit. As advertisers move their money to Netflix, YouTube and other digital streamers, linear television — local television news, broadcast affiliates, basic cable networks — has suffered, forcing them to consolidate and close newsrooms. In that sense, Nexstar argued, the merger would help it compete for advertising revenue with streaming services, creating more robust local journalism. However, opponents of the merger believe it is a fundamental violation of antitrust laws and principles – not to mention the danger of giving one company editorial control over most of America’s local television newsrooms.

But the second Trump administration has handled regulatory hurdles a little differently than others, and companies have found that it’s faster to get what they want if they bypass the agencies and talk (read: suck) to Trump directly. And when Nexstar did so publicly, it confirmed its opponents’ fears about political influence. Last September, in the difficult weeks following the fatal firing of Charlie Kirk, Nexstar announced that it would no longer broadcast Jimmy Kimmel Live! – A response to Carr’s claim that the FCC could revoke the broadcast licenses of TV stations that aired the comedian’s comments related to Kirk. This led ABC to briefly suspend Kimmel’s show, although ABC and Nexstar soon reversed their decision after a massive nationwide backlash and an ABC boycott.

However, Nexstar’s loyalty to Trump was not enough to win over his most powerful MAGA supporters. Newsmax, a cable news network that is deeply pro-Trump, and its CEO, longtime Trump donor and outside consultant Chris Ruddy, filed a lawsuit objecting to the merger, claiming that Nexstar’s anti-competitive behavior would force channels like his to shut down with huge fees. He specifically accused Nexstar of raising stations’ fees to carry Newsmax, while offering its similar network, NewsNation, much cheaper.

The Nexstar-Tegna MAGA transition then took a more subtle turn. NewsNation hired pro-Trump Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich and gave her her own primetime show. (The network had also already hired several former Fox journalists.) Around this time, a political group called Keep News Local began airing ads in DC that directly addressed Trump, praising him for “defeating the fake news monopoly through independent voices and local news” and claiming that the Nexstar-Tegna merger was “crucial to MAGA’s survival.” (A little self-contradictory and a little illogical, but that’s the kind of thing Trump likes to hear.) When I last spoke to Rudy in February, I asked if he was worried that the dark money going to Keep News Local would influence Trump, and he chose his words carefully: “I think at the end of the day, Trump makes up his mind. I’m not sure he’ll be influenced by an ad campaign.”

For months, no one could accurately predict whether Trump would grant Carr’s wishes and bless the deal, as he often does for other companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Trump’s truthful social posts about the merger are a good indicator of how uncertain the merger is and who is able to influence them at any time: Last November, he dismissed the deal as “an expansion of the fake news networks,” but by February, he posted that the deal would “help eliminate fake news because there will be more competition.”

Several current and former employees of NewsNation told Situation At the time he feared that the parent company was moving NewsNation away from the centrist, “unbiased” reputation it had long earned. “Many people within the network believe that the network has tried hard to appeal to Trump and Brendan Carr,” a former employee told CNN. Situation. Coincidentally, just days before the deal was finalized, NewsNation began increasing explicitly pro-Trump content, tweeting a clip of White House Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt berating CNN’s Kaitlyn Collins, along with the comment “Just going to leave it at that.”

When Trump greenlighted the merger in mid-March, but before the three FCC commissioners could vote on whether to waive the ownership limits, Nexstar and Tegna immediately announced a new complication: Tegna and Nexstar had already begun the merger. Tegna is no more and CEO Mike Steube had already sold $22.6 million of his company’s stock.

In response, eight state attorneys general and satellite TV operator DirecTV, which was already planning to file separate federal antitrust lawsuits against the merger, asked U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley in Sacramento for an emergency restraining order that would prevent Nexstar from taking over Tegna’s assets. The order was granted on March 27 and on April 17, Nunley issued a formal injunction, ruling that Tegna must be operated as an independent financial entity, and that Nexstar must take steps to ensure that it remains separate from Tegna prior to further legal proceedings.

For now, Nunley has allowed the states and DirecTV to combine their cases, with both arguing that the merger was a clear violation of antitrust laws and would crush news competition.

Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats in Congress are furious at Carr. On March 30, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent a joint letter to the Chairman admonishing him for allowing his staff to waive the rules to pass the merger rather than letting the full Commission of Political Appointees – one from the Biden administration – vote on it. “Under these circumstances,” he wrote, “any subsequent vote risks being largely procedural rather than a genuine exercise of the Commission’s responsibility.” He also pointed out that their hasty approval without Commission approval would now make the merger financially complex: “In transactions of this scale, where integration proceeds rapidly and unwinding becomes impractical, delaying judicial review could protect the decision from meaningful challenge.” In particular, although they share similar ideological views on media and regulation, Cruz and Carr have often quarreled over how to achieve their objectives. For example, Cruz previously called Carr a “mafioso” for the way he used the FCC to silence Kimmel.

But even if it is legally stopped, journalism mergers are beginning to have an impact on local news. NPR’s David Folkenfirk reported Tuesday that Tegna journalists have already begun receiving orders to stop airing content from major broadcasters like ABC, CBS and NBC — the media outlets being targeted by Carr — and instead begin airing content from Nexstar’s NewsNation.