The World’s Shortest Defamation Trial Left a Chilling Lesson Jean Carroll Trial Will Probably Doom Him in Court Again and Againĭominion’s Defense of Democracy Was Always a Negotiating Tactic It would be a bad political move, and it would be really bad for AT&T to agree to that.Trump Was Implicated in a Vote Machine Theft. "If this is political and it really is about CNN, the media is just going to slaughter the Trump administration. and the first thing you do is lose a major lawsuit, that’s a major embarrassment," one of these people said. Multiple sources I spoke with noted Delrahim’s apparent 180, and questioned whether he was being strong-armed, telling me it would be a bad look for him to go to court and lose. Politics seems to at least be something people want to talk about when it comes to the perceived opposition from the Department of Justice.” But as David Faber noted on CNBC Wednesday morning, “In 40 years, there has not been a vertical integration that has been blocked. could maybe try to make a case that common ownership of both Turner and DirecTV would create a scenario whereby Turner could leverage DirecTV against other distributors to seek higher rates for them. (In other words, an apple company acquiring a banana company, as opposed to two apple companies or two banana companies merging.) One person close to the deal posited to me that the D.O.J. was “laying the groundwork for a potential lawsuit challenging” the merger, which would marry a telecom titan that owns more than 100 million smartphones, and the Midtown Manhattan-centered parent entity of media and entertainment stalwarts including CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., whose premium content offerings are ripe for its suitor’s mobile devices.ĪT&T is confident they would prevail in court because there isn’t strong precedent for blocking vertical mergers like this one. The first curveball had come on November 2, in the form of a Wall Street Journal story reporting that the D.O.J. Today’s news “caught 99 percent of the people at the company by surprise,” the source said. How did we think this is gonna end? It’s outrageous.” Another insider told me that people throughout the Turner portfolio are “freaking out.” They’d finally gotten their heads around the idea that they would soon be owned by AT&T, a Dallas-based operation with no media or entertainment experience. “There’s a contingent here that felt like, you have a litigious, vindictive commander in chief with the opportunity to take a poke at a network he believes covers him unfairly. “This is political, this is unprecedented, and the only explanation is political pressure from the White House,” a CNN employee told me. Inside CNN, the mood was as charged as you’d expect it to be. The Justice Department’s late-stage requirements for the merger seemed to confirm people’s fears. He even threatened to kill it, and had reportedly toyed with the idea of using CNN as a bargaining chip. 1 for President Donald Trump, who had expressed his distaste for the AT&T-Time Warner merger early on. Rather, they believe it’s about politics, and CNN in particular. Department of Justice that it needs to sell CNN to get its $84.5bn acquisition of the media company approved.”)įew people I spoke to at AT&T or Time Warner believe that anti-trust concerns are driving this hard bargain. ![]() (The Financial Times first reported on Wednesday, citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of the negotiations, that “AT&T has been told by the U.S. Stephenson’s response, according to the people briefed on the interaction with Delrahim, was more or less: We’ll see you in court. and March Madness games, and other prominent television assets-that accounts for more than half of the profits of the company you’ve spent the past year gearing up to own. To Stephenson, both choices were thoroughly unpalatable: ditch the company you’ve spent the past two years painstakingly integrating into your business, or ditch the portfolio of premium broadcast brands-which in addition to CNN includes TBS, TNT, N.B.A. to green-light the $85 billion mega merger, he would have to either sell Turner Broadcasting, the parent entity of CNN, which AT&T would acquire as part of the deal, or sell DirecTV, the satellite provider AT&T acquired in 2015. According to three people briefed on the conversation, Delrahim told Stephenson that if AT&T wanted the D.O.J. They were there to discuss AT&T’s long- awaited purchase of Time Warner, which has been in the final stages of a protracted regulatory review. Randall Stephenson was in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s new anti-trust chief, who was confirmed by the Senate in late September.
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