A judge late on Friday temporarily paused a planned merger between media companies Nexstar and Tegna, throwing a wrench into plans blessed by President Donald Trump to establish the country’s largest television company.
In his 14-day temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley, an Obama appointee, sided with DirecTV, which claimed in a lawsuit filed last week that Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna is an endeavor to “drive up the price it can extract from DIRECTV and other distributors,” enact mass layoffs and reduce competition.
“Here, the Court agrees with Plaintiff that Defendants’ integration efforts are exactly those that would make it more difficult to divest TEGNA stations, eliminate competition, and result in newsroom layoffs and shutdowns,” Nunley wrote in his Friday ruling.
Eight states — New York, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia — sued to block the merger in a separate filing on the same day as DirecTV’s. But just hours later, the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger, bypassing a longstanding cap on the number of viewers a broadcaster can reach nationwide and angering some of the president’s conservative media allies.
The merger is on pause until April 7, when Nunley scheduled an in-person hearing to divine the future of the potential acquisition. The two companies are barred from further integration until then.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the stalled deal may well draw the ire of the president, who wrote on Truth Social in February that a merger of the two companies would help buttress against “THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks.”
“Letting Good Deals get done like Nexstar - Tegna will help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition, and at a higher and more sophisticated level,” Trump wrote.
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