The future of local TV news has taken a Trumpian turn

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Long ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission put in place a rule meant to prevent monopolies: No single company could broadcast to more than 39% of all TV homes in the United States. But then Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became Chairman of the FCC and immediately began a deregulation initiative called “Delete, Delete, Delete,” in which Carr pledged to get rid of “every rule, regulation, or guidance document” that places “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on companies. Within months, Nexstar, which already owned more than 200 stations across the country and had reached its ownership cap, announced it had entered into an agreement to buy rival Tegna for an estimated $6.2 billion — something that could only happen if Carr agreed to change FCC rules.

If you ask Nexstar why it would seek a merger that would give it control 80 percent of the marketit points to big tech companies as the culprit. As advertisers take their money to Netflix, YouTube, and other digital streaming companies, linear TV — local TV news, broadcast affiliates, and basic cable networks — has struggled, forcing them to consolidate and close newsrooms. In this sense, Nexstar argued that the merger would help it compete for advertising revenue with streaming services, thus building a stronger local journalism. However, opponents of the merger believe that this constitutes a fundamental violation of antitrust laws and principles – not to mention the danger of allowing a single company to gain editorial control over the vast majority of local television newsrooms in America.

But the second Trump administration handles regulatory hurdles a little differently than others, and companies have found it’s faster to get what they want if they bypass agencies and talk (read: cajole) Trump directly. When Nexstar did so publicly, it confirmed its opponents’ concerns about political influence. Last September, in the fraught weeks following the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, Nexstar announced it would no longer broadcast its programming Jimmy Kimmel Live! – In response to Carr’s claim that the FCC can revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcast television stations Comedian comments Related to kirk. This briefly led to ABC suspending Kimmel’s showalthough ABC and Nexstar quickly reversed their decision after widespread nationwide backlash and a boycott of ABC.

However, Nexstar’s loyalty to Trump himself was not enough to win over his strongest MAGA supporters. Newsmax, a cable news network with a deep pro-Trump lean, and its CEO, longtime Trump donor and outside consultant Chris Ruddy, have filed a lawsuit to object to the merger, claiming that Nexstar’s anti-competitive behavior would force channels like his to go off the air with steeper carriage fees. It is specifically accused Nexstar has raised fees for stations that carry Newsmax, while offering its similar network, NewsNation, at a much cheaper price.

Then the Nexstar-Tegna MAGA transformation took a more subtle turn. Newsnation It hired pro-Trump Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich And it gave her her own primetime show. (The network had already hired a large number of former Fox journalists as well.) Around this time, a political group called Keep News Local began running ads in D.C. that appeared to directly address Trump, praising him for having “defeated fake news monopolies before with independent voices and local news” and claiming that the Nexstar-Tegna merger was “crucial to MAGA’s survival.” (A bit contradictory and a bit illogical, but the kind of thing Trump likes to hear.) When I last spoke with Ruddy in February, I asked him if he feared the dark money going into Keep News Local would influence Trump, and he chose his words carefully: “I think at the end of the day Trump makes up his own mind. I’m not sure he would be swayed by an ad campaign.”

For months, no one could accurately predict whether Trump would override Carr’s wishes and bless the deal, as he often does with other companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Trump’s social media posts about the merger were a good indicator of how risky the merger was and who could influence it at any moment: Last November, he criticized the deal as an “expansion of fake news networks,” but by February, he posted that the deal would “help eliminate fake news because there will be more competition.”

said several current and former NewsNation employees condition at that time They feared the parent company would be steering NewsNation away from the “unbiased” centrist reputation they had long earned. “A lot of people inside the network believe the network went out of its way to woo Trump and Brendan Carr,” one former employee said. condition. Coincidentally, days before the deal was finalized, NewsNation began ramping up its explicitly pro-Trump content, Tweet a clip from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins She was reprimanded by White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt, along with the comment “I’ll leave this here.”

When Trump greenlighted the merger in mid-March, but before the three FCC commissioners could vote to waive the ownership cap, Nexstar and Tegna immediately announced a new complication: Tegna and Nexstar have already begun merging. Tegna is no longer around and CEO Mike Steib had already sold $22.6 million of his company’s shares.

In response, eight attorneys general and satellite TV operator DirectTV, who were already planning to file separate federal antitrust lawsuits against the merger, asked U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley in Sacramento to issue an emergency restraining order that would prevent Nexstar from seizing Tegna’s assets. The order was granted on 27 March And on April 17th Nunley issued a formal injunctionruling that Tegna must be operated as an independent financial entity, and Nexstar must take steps to ensure it remains separate from Tegna before taking further legal action.

For now, Nunley has allowed the states and DirecTV to merge their case, 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 angry with Carr. On March 30, Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) Send the President a joint letter He chides him for allowing his staff to waive regulations to allow the merger to pass, rather than having the full committee of political appointees — one of them from the Biden administration — vote on it. “Under these circumstances, any subsequent vote would be largely procedural and not a true exercise of committee responsibility,” they wrote. They also noted that their hasty approval without committee approval would now complicate the merger financially: “In a deal of this size, where integration is progressing rapidly and unbundling is impractical, a delay in judicial review could insulate the decision from real appeal.” Notably, although they share similar ideological views on media and deregulation, Cruz and Carr often clashed On how to achieve their goals. Cruz had previously criticized Carr, calling him a “mafia member.” For example, because of the way he used the FCC to silence Kimmel.

But even if it is temporarily halted legally, the fallout from the journalistic merger is starting to reach local news. NPR’s David Volkenwerk reported Tuesday Tegna journalists have already begun receiving orders to stop broadcasting content from major broadcast stations such as ABC, CBS and NBC — the media outlets that Carr is targeting — and instead begin broadcasting content from Nexstar’s NewsNation.