Friday, February 27, 2026
For CNN, a Change in Ownership Means a Suddenly Uncertain Future
For CNN, a Change in Ownership Means a Suddenly Uncertain Future
“Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN, has raised concerns within the CNN newsroom about potential compromises to their independence. David Ellison, the chairman of Paramount Skydance, is known for his close relationship with President Trump and his recent revamp of CBS News, leading to worries about potential political influence. While the future of CNN under Ellison’s ownership remains uncertain, there is speculation about potential leadership changes and a possible merger of CBS and CNN’s news operations.
Paramount’s apparent victory over Netflix in securing Warner Bros. Discovery has led to concerns within the CNN newsroom.
Once again, CNN is facing an uncertain fate.
Netflix’s stunning surrender on Thursday in its effort to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery all but assures that the 24-hour news channel will soon be controlled by David Ellison, the chairman of Paramount Skydance and the technology heir best known in the journalism world for his recent revamp of CBS News.
Mr. Ellison’s intentions for the channel remain unclear. But the development has caused some shudders within the CNN newsroom, where the chief executive, Mark Thompson, felt compelled to issue a memo shortly after Netflix’s announcement.
“Despite all the speculation you’ve read during this process, I’d suggest that you don’t jump to conclusions about the future until we know more,” Mr. Thompson wrote. In an email with the subject line “Corporate Update,” he urged his journalists to focus on the “newsy year at home and abroad,” including the upcoming midterm elections “and who knows what else.”
Within CNN, though, reporters and producers have expressed concern that their newsroom’s independence, a point of pride, could be compromised in the event that Paramount absorbs the company.
Mr. Ellison has a friendly relationship with President Trump, who regularly assails CNN as biased. When Mr. Ellison acquired Paramount last year, the Trump administration approved the sale after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump against “60 Minutes.” On Tuesday, Mr. Ellison attended Mr. Trump’s State of the Union speech as a guest of Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.
Upon taking over CBS News, Mr. Ellison appointed Kenneth R. Weinstein, a conservative policy veteran with no experience overseeing news coverage, to serve as the news division’s ombudsman. And he selected Bari Weiss as editor in chief, elevating an opinion journalist with a long history of criticizing old-line media institutions.
Ms. Weiss has asked veteran CBS correspondents why the country thinks they have a liberal bias and drew accusations of political interference when she abruptly postponed a “60 Minutes” segment critical of the Trump administration. She has said that she acts independently, and some conservatives have applauded the changes.
It is unclear if Ms. Weiss would be involved in CNN’s leadership if Mr. Ellison completes the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. One logical outcome, though, might be to combine CBS and CNN’s news gathering operations.
How Mr. Trump might respond to an Ellison-owned CNN is not guaranteed. The president can be a fickle viewer; in October, he pronounced Larry and David Ellison as “friends of mine” who will “do the right thing” at CBS. But weeks later, he condemned “60 Minutes” for treating him “far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before.”
In December, when Netflix was poised to win Warner Bros., there was a sigh of relief at CNN. Netflix had chosen to exclude CNN from the Warner assets that it was seeking to purchase, meaning the channel would be unlikely to factor in any efforts to secure the blessings of the Trump administration.
In that situation, Mr. Thompson would continue to oversee the network, and Gunnar Wiedenfels, the Warner Bros. chief financial officer, would run a new spinoff company that included CNN.
But Mr. Ellison has long signaled that he wants CNN to be part of any acquisition.
Anderson Cooper, who had spent nearly 20 years as a “60 Minutes” correspondent while holding down his nightly CNN anchoring gig, surprised Paramount when he announced last week that he would not renew his deal with the CBS Sunday show. It is possible that Mr. Cooper may soon be reporting to Paramount again.
On Thursday evening, Ms. Weiss was attending an event sponsored by The Free Press, the independent site that she co-founded and sold to Mr. Ellison last year. On X, she posted a photograph from the event and added a caption.
“Nowhere I’d rather be,” Ms. Weiss wrote, and then added, puckishly, “Though I hear there’s some news?”
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.“
In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims
In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims
“The Trump administration’s claims justifying military action against Iran are false or unproven. Iran has not restarted its nuclear program, does not have enough enriched uranium to build a bomb quickly, and is not close to developing missiles capable of reaching the United States. Despite the administration’s assertions, intelligence reports and international assessments contradict these claims.
Key elements of the Trump administration’s arguments this week for another military campaign against Iran do not hold up.
As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.
All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House has presented in recent days.
Iran has taken steps to dig out the nuclear facilities hit during strikes last June by Israel and the United States, and it has resumed work at some sites long known to American spy agencies. But the officials said that there isn’t evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.
The stockpiles of uranium that Iran has already enriched remain buried after last year’s strikes, making it nearly impossible for Iran to build a bomb “within days.”
Iran has a large arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and American military bases in the Middle East, but American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.
The Pentagon for weeks has been moving ships, planes and air defense units to the Middle East as part of the largest American military buildup in the region in more than two decades. This escalation, along with Mr. Trump’s threats, has brought criticism that the White House has made no public case to justify a second American military conflict in Iran in less than a year.
Now, top Trump administration officials have begun to make the case, and key elements of their arguments do not hold up under close scrutiny. They have even contradicted each other in their public statements.
Mr. Trump’s statements about the urgency of the threat posed by Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address this week had echoes of 2003, when President George W. Bush used the State of the Union to build a case for war in Iraq. During that speech, he asserted that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa to fuel a nascent nuclear weapons program. That claim, like so many other Bush administration assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs, was later proved to be false.
“I’m very concerned,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday after a closed-door meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Wars in the Middle East don’t go well for presidents, for the country, and we have not heard articulated a single good reason for why now is the moment to launch yet another war in the Middle East.”
Iran is believed to have some 2,000 short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. Experts said that the country appears to have largely replenished this arsenal since firing hundreds of missiles at Israel — and more than a dozen at a U.S. military base in Qatar — last June.
Iran has steadily increased the range of its ballistic missiles, and its most powerful missiles can hit Central and Eastern Europe.
But in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a new claim, saying Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”
The following day, Mr. Rubio repeated the president’s assertion about Iran’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, although he used different language about how quickly Iran could be capable of hitting the United States. While Mr. Trump said it would be “soon,” Mr. Rubio said it would be “one day.”
“You’ve seen them increasing the range of the missiles they have now, and clearly they are headed in the pathway to one day being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental U.S.,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
Three American officials with access to current intelligence about Iran’s missile programs said that Mr. Trump exaggerated the immediacy of the threat posed to the United States. One official said some intelligence analysts were concerned that top aides have inflated the threats or that intelligence was being selectively presented or distorted as it was sent upward.
A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency last year concluded that Iran did not have ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States, and that it might take as long as a decade for it to have up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even to reach that number of missiles on that timetable, the intelligence agency found, Iran would need to make a determined push to develop that technology.
When asked on Wednesday about the Defense Intelligence Agency report, Mr. Rubio declined to comment.
Concern over Iranian missiles is hardly new for the U.S. government. As far back as 2010, a classified assessment released by WikiLeaks revealed that the U.S. government was secretly monitoring missile technology aid that North Korea was giving to Iran.
The missiles in question were medium-range, able to travel more than 2,000 miles, enough for Iran to hit parts of Europe. Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable dated Feb. 24, 2010. At the time, American officials warned that the advanced propulsion could speed Iran’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
But 16 years later, there is still no evidence that Iran has made its long-range missile program a top priority.
Instead, Iran has put far greater focus on building up its arsenal of short- and medium-range missiles, believing it could be the most effective deterrent against Israeli or American efforts to overthrow the government in Tehran.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has authorized government officials to negotiate with the United States over the country’s nuclear program. The missile program, he insists, is not negotiable.
Steve Witkoff, the White House’s lead negotiator in those discussions with the Iranians, said on Fox News on Saturday that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material.”
But American officials and international weapons inspectors said that was not the case, largely because the U.S. and Israeli strikes last June badly damaged Iran’s three main nuclear sites, Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan.
Those attacks made it far more difficult for Iran to access the near-bomb-grade fuel it would need to produce a nuclear weapon quickly. Even if it were to dig it out, experts said, it would take many months — perhaps more than a year — to turn it into a warhead.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, most of the nearly 1,000 pounds of Iran’s 60 percent enriched uranium is buried at Isfahan. There is little evidence that the Iranians are digging out the deep-underground containers in which the uranium is stored.
And without that stockpile, which would have to be further enriched to 90 percent purity before it could be fabricated into a bomb, it is nearly impossible for the Iranian military to produce a weapon.
Even some of Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress have seemed to question Mr. Witkoff’s assertion that Iran could build a bomb so quickly.
“I can’t speak for Steve. I haven’t got those reports, and I’ve been read in on some of those programs,” Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said on CNN this week. “I’m not saying he’s wrong or he’s right, I just haven’t seen those reports.”
Mr. Rubio acknowledged on Wednesday that there was no evidence the Iranians were currently enriching nuclear fuel.
In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Trump reiterated his claim that the strikes last June completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program — “we wiped it out,” he said — but asserted that Iran had restarted the program.
“They want to start it all over again and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he said.
American officials who have been briefed on U.S. intelligence assessments said that Iran has not built any new nuclear sites since last June. In recent months, however, Iranian activity has been detected at two still-incomplete nuclear sites that were not struck in last year’s war.
One is near Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment site, which both Israel and the United States struck. Another is near Isfahan, where most of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium is now buried after the June attack.
Iranian engineers also appear to be exploring how to burrow further underground. U.S. intelligence reports have indicated that Iran could be excavating as a way to build new facilities that would be out of the reach of the most powerful conventional U.S. weapon, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which the Pentagon used last June against the Fordo nuclear site.
The Fordo facility remains inoperable, according to American officials.
Eric Schmitt, William J. Broad and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.“
Trump’s Foreign Policy: Resurrecting Empire
Trump’s Foreign Policy: Resurrecting Empire
“President Trump’s foreign policy, characterized by aggressive actions and reliance on force, is seen as a revival of imperialistic ambitions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference emphasized the importance of Western civilization and its history of expansion, sparking concerns about the implications for international relations, particularly in the Global South. Critics argue that this celebration of empire is out of place in a decolonized world and could have significant consequences.
President Trump’s approach is a revival of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples.
By Edward Wong
Edward Wong has reported on the Iraq War, the rise of China and U.S. foreign policy. He covered Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to Europe this month.
President Trump’s foreign policy has veered wildly across the globe, but has remained consistent in its aggressive nature and reliance on the use of force.
He has seized the leader of Venezuela while claiming the country’s oil and attacking nearby civilian boats. He has pushed Cuba into a humanitarian crisisthrough a blockade, and asserted a right to control Canada and Greenland. And he has amassed the largest U.S. military force in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, threatening a new war against Iran after attacks last June.
Mr. Trump calls his policy “America First” — a stated focus on U.S. interests as he defines them. But it is not isolationism or a retreat from the world, as some analysts have argued. Nor has it manifested yet in a push to create “spheres of influence,” where the administration would be content to dominate only the Western Hemisphere and leave other regions to rival powers.
From one perspective, it is a resurrection of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples — that animated European and other well-armed powers up to the 20th century. It is also an embrace, and even a celebration, of Western imperial histories.
In his inauguration speech last year, Mr. Trump praised President William McKinley, who transformed the United States into an overseas empire during the Spanish-American War by acquiring the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.
Mr. Trump’s form of American primacy was most clearly articulated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month in a speech at the Munich Security Conference.
“For five centuries, before the end of the second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Mr. Rubio told an audience of mostly European officials.
Then, after 1945, when World War II ended and Europe was in ruins, “the West” was “contracting,” Mr. Rubio said.
He condemned anticolonial independence movements, linking them to Communist ideology and blaming them for eroding Western power. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anticolonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map,” he said.
Mr. Rubio then said the Trump administration did not want allies “shackled by guilt and shame,” using the same language as Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the German hard-right party.
“We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it,” he said.
Later in the speech, he warned of “civilizational erasure.”
Mr. Rubio got a standing ovation. His speech, while brimming with harsh criticism of European nations, evoked the shared history of the United States and Europe. For some historians and American conservatives, the speech also encapsulated ideas about liberalism and the decline of the West that were expressed decades earlier by the right-wing writers James Burnham and Pat Buchanan.
As Mr. Trump pushes bellicose actions — he threatens war against Iran almost daily, and spoke of Greenland again last weekend — some analysts have looked to Mr. Rubio’s speech as a sign of things to come.
“Rubio accurately reflected where Trump’s foreign policy stands today,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian of American power at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Despite widespread fears that Trump might pull back from the world, he is working to reinvigorate U.S. military dominance across the board. It’s America First globalism. Far from exiting alliances, Trump is weaponizing them as platforms for coercion.”
The celebration of empire would have been normal in Europe in the early 20th century, “but it is out of place in a world that has decolonized and democratized,” Mr. Wertheim said.
Nader Hashemi, a scholar of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, said that as Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio push their imperial policies, “the consequences for international relations will be enormous, especially in the Global South, where the political identity of most nation-states was formed in the context of a decolonization struggle against Western imperialism.”
“In the Arab-Islamic world,” he added, “extremist forces will exploit this development to attract new recruits.” And Russia and China could benefit, after decades of trying to rally other countries to their side by criticizing what they have called American imperialism.
The State Department did not reply to an email with questions.
Speaking about his homeland, Mr. Rubio waxed rhapsodic about American and European colonialists working hand-in-hand to claim territory: “German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse” in the Midwest, and “French fur traders and explorers whose names, by the way, still adorn the street signs and towns’ names all across the Mississippi Valley.”
Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, also hailed his ancestors from Italy and Spain.
The “empty plains” are, of course, a myth: Native Americans lived there for millennia before they were killed and subjugated by settler colonialists. Not once did Mr. Rubio mention the many millions murdered, tortured and imprisoned in the wars waged around the world in the name of empire.
Nor did he nod to the imperial institution of slavery and the role of enslaved Africans in building the United States, from the colonial era to the Civil War. He also avoided discussing the living legacies of empire in the West, including the many immigrants from former colonized nations and descendants of slaves who have shaped their countries.
Some historians said Mr. Rubio was perhaps the only top U.S. official in recent decades to celebrate empire in such an explicit manner.
“Celebrating the U.S. as heir to Western civilization is nothing new, but at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt, presidents and diplomats speak of the United States as an enemy of empire and imperialism,” said John Delury, a historian who has written about U.S. and East Asian foreign policies.
“Textbooks have been updated to acknowledge how ‘explorers’ enslaved people as chattel labor, ‘missionaries’ erased Indigenous cultures and religions, and ‘pioneers’ dispossessed native peoples of their homes and livelihoods,” he added.
Constanze Stelzenmüller, the director of the Center on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said the paean to empire was particularly striking to officials and analysts at the Munich conference who came from former colonized nations. “They were saying, ‘This is astounding,’” she said. At the same time, she added, some officials took the attitude of: “OK, the U.S. is reverting to type, and at least you’re being honest.”
Ms. Stelzenmüller said that celebrating empire has not been central to discourse on the European hard-right, which is often appealed to by top Trump aides. So it was puzzling, she added, why Mr. Rubio used those lines. The aim might have been to normalize the idea of unstoppable American power and expansion, including over Greenland, she said.
“I think this language may be part of an attempt to condition Europeans into acceptance — that they’re powerless to resist whatever expansionist designs the administration might have,” Ms. Stelzenmüller argued.
Michael Kimmage, the director of the Kennan Institute, a center for research on Eurasia, said that Mr. Rubio was activating a counter-tradition of foreign policy that arose on the American right during the 1950s and 1960s.
The ideas were most vividly expressed by National Review and one of its columnists, Mr. Burnham, who wrote a book, “The Suicide of the West,” that was a critique of modern liberalism and a “lament for the loss of empire,” as Mr. Kimmage put it.
Mr. Rubio’s evocation of a “contracting” West echoed Mr. Burnham.
“He identified immigration and loss of civilizational self-confidence as the core problems of a post-imperial West,” Mr. Kimmage said. “Rubio is clearly reworking these ideas. The ideas themselves are not new. What’s new is that they’re now being espoused from the State Department and the White House, as they had not been for the past seven decades.”
Andrew Day, a writer for The American Conservative, which advocates non-interventionism, said he thought Mr. Rubio was underscoring the Trump administration’s policy of bolstering pride in Western civilization — an admirable project with poor execution, in his view — rather than endorsing empire.
“I sincerely doubt that Rubio was promoting a return to imperialism and colonialism,” he said. “Rather, he was pointing to a certain cultural malaise and lack of self-confidence that Westerners suffer from.”
But Mr. Day noted that conservative restrainers remained skeptical of Mr. Rubio, whom they see as a hawkish advocate of American global hegemony. The secretary of state has recently pushed for actions against Venezuela, Cuba and Iran.
“They believed Rubio was putting civilizational lipstick on a neoconservative pig, so to speak,” Mr. Day said.
That crowd is also suspicious of Europe, he added, and believes the administration’s “‘Western civilizational’ framework is grandiose and internationalist, and thus incompatible with a sharp focus on America’s national interests.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.“
Thursday, February 26, 2026
The Media Merger You Should Actually Care About
The Media Merger You Should Actually Care About
“An under-the-radar, Trump-approved deal could create a broadcasting behemoth that controls local news stations across more than forty states. Why do some maga diehards oppose it?
Illustation by Ricardo Tomas
During the first Trump Administration, Sinclair, a company that owns almost two hundred local TV stations across the United States, and is known for its conservative bent, instructed its news anchors to recite a near-identical script on air. “The sharing of bias and false news has become all too common on social media, and more alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories without checking facts first,” the script went. “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” The message was recognizably Trumpian, and the fact that it was repeated verbatim dozens of times itself whiffed of thought control. The news site Deadspin took clips of different anchors intoning the same words and laid them over one another to make a hellish cacophony.
Last summer, Sinclair reportedly attempted to expand its empire, proposing a merger with Tegna, a broadcaster with nearly seventy stations. In the end, though, it was beaten out by a rival, Nexstar, which, in August, announced a deal to acquire Tegna for around six billion dollars. Nexstar was already the biggest station owner in the U.S. by revenue and market reach; if the acquisition went through, it would control more than two hundred and fifty stations across forty-four states and the District of Columbia. In response to a question about the Sinclair episode, Perry Sook, the C.E.O. of Nexstar, insisted that his company doesn’t “dictate content.” The following month, however, Nexstar courted controversy of its own when it refused to air the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show on its ABC affiliates, after Kimmel insinuated, in the opinion of some viewers, that a right-winger may have killed Charlie Kirk. (Sinclair also preëmpted Kimmel on its ABC affiliates.)
Hours before Nexstar pulled the plug, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, had implied that stations could face licensing consequences if they let Kimmel’s show air. (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, memorably.) He was quick to thank Nexstar for doing “the right thing,” and has since openly endorsed its bid for Tegna, even though the F.C.C.’s review of the deal is ongoing. So, too, has Donald Trump. “We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks,” he wrote, earlier this month, on Truth Social. “GET THAT DEAL DONE!”
Many progressives, unsurprisingly, have opposed the Nexstar deal. And yet scorn has not broken cleanly along partisan lines. The pro-Trump networks One America News and Newsmax have both come out against the deal; the latter’s C.E.O., Chris Ruddy, has been perhaps its most visible critic, arguing, somewhat convincingly, that big TV companies being allowed to get bigger is an existential threat to independent outlets like his own. (Ruddy has said that NewsNation, a cable network that is owned by Nexstar, has already won more favorable terms from distributors, despite having worse ratings.) Speaking at a congressional hearing days after the Trump endorsement, Ruddy suggested that the President had been poorly advised and didn’t fully understand the matter. The politics of the issue are further scrambled when you consider that Trump at first appeared to side with Ruddy, with whom he is friendly, before U-turning.
At the heart of all this jockeying is an obscure law that prevents owners of local stations from reaching more than thirty-nine per cent of households nationwide, across all their properties. (Indeed, Trump’s initial stance centered not on the Nexstar deal but on maintaining this cap.) The way the cap is calculated isn’t straightforward, but by any measure, a combined Nexstar and Tegna would blitz through it, meaning that the cap would need to be waived, raised, or abolished for their merger to pass. Critics see the cap as a relic of a bygone age—it has its roots in the New Deal era—and an unfair handicap for companies that must nowadays compete for ad dollars with tech and entertainment behemoths. Supporters of the cap argue, variously, that companies like Nexstar are doing just fine financially, and that allowing them to grow further would be bad not only for the diversity of viewpoints on local TV—the Orwellian Sinclair video again springs to mind—but for consumer prices and journalism jobs. (Addressing Congress, Ruddy claimed that if the price of milk increased at the same rate as the fees that station owners charge TV providers, a gallon would now cost sixty-nine dollars.) Carr has suggested repeatedly that green-lighting deals like Nexstar’s would weaken the grip of New York and Hollywood liberals over TV in the heartland. Ruddy has argued the exact opposite.
The Nexstar-Tegna story is politically messy and technical, and the deal itself isn’t that big in dollars and cents. Evan Swarztrauber, a tech-policy consultant who supports lifting the ownership cap, and who advised Carr when he was an F.C.C. commissioner during Trump’s first term, pointed out to me that the valuation of the entire merger is roughly that of the breakup fee in Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And yet, the Nexstar deal, which is comparatively under the radar, speaks to many of the same issues—from the competitiveness of traditional media companies in a world of streaming and podcasts to the shifting antitrust posture of Trump’s regulators—and more besides. The conservative Washington Examiner has rightly described the ownership-cap debate as “one of the most consequential and least understood regulatory decisions” of this moment.
Viewed another way, the deal is the latest installment in the ongoing, if asymmetric, power struggle between the executive and legislative branches. (Many proponents of waiving the ownership cap believe that the F.C.C. can do so unilaterally; many critics insist that this would be illegal without congressional approval.) The fight over the deal also represents a fresh iteration of a related trend that I wrote about last year: the tangle of small- and big-government philosophies driving the second Trump Administration, and the coalitional tensions they seem to reflect. (After Ruddy claimed that Ronald Reagan would have supported his case, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board accused him of “taking the Gipper’s name in vain.”) The cost-cutting zeal of DOGE may now feel like a distant nightmare, but deregulatory and regulatory impulses continue to coexist, not least at the F.C.C. If Nexstar, Sinclair, and their ilk may be poised to benefit from the former, networks that the Administration likes a whole lot less are already feeling the heat of the latter. And, in fact, the deployment of both, simultaneously, might not be a contradiction at all.
The congressional hearing at which Ruddy recently spoke was not your typical partisan food fight. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, and who won headlines last year for likening Carr’s comments about Kimmel to the language of a Mob boss, sounded distinctly unimpressed by the idea that the F.C.C. could simply override the will of Congress to change the ownership cap. But otherwise, he didn’t take an overt position on the merits of such a change; Steven Waldman, the founder of the media-policy group Rebuild Local News, who also testified, told me that Cruz’s opening remarks—in which he traced the history of broadcast media from “I Love Lucy” through our modern era of media fragmentation—were “almost journalistic” in their evenhandedness. Most of Cruz’s Democratic colleagues were nuanced, too. In Waldman’s testimony, he said that he sympathized, to an extent, with both proponents and critics of raising the cap—even if evidence shows that corporate mergers certainly do not guarantee greater investment in local journalism, as industry lobbyists have suggested.
At one point, Waldman had a strikingly friendly exchange with Todd Young, a Republican senator from Indiana. Young’s statement “was among the most eloquent things I’ve heard recently on the importance of community media,” Waldman told me, adding that, in his experience, Republican politicians often have “a real sense for not just the accountability aspects of journalism but the community-cohesion aspects.” This mirrored another trend that I wrote about last year—of Republican lawmakers in certain states quietly pushing bills to help revive flagging local outlets, beneath the fray of their party’s national-level war on the mainstream media. Efforts to reinvigorate local journalism are often focussed on print media, but local TV news is more widely consumed—and generally more trusted than its national counterparts. (A surprising number of local-news anchors have used that trust as a springboard to launch political careers.)
Swarztrauber claims that Carr, too, values local news. “There are people right now arguing that we should just shut down all broadcasters and sell their spectrum to wireless carriers,” he told me. “Carr’s not talking about that. He’s saying that there’s a public good here.” Certainly Carr has long talked about deregulating the airwaves, including in a chapter that he wrote for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s infamous blueprint for a second Trump term, in which he advocated “eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo” and “creating a market-friendly regulatory environment.” (Swarztrauber recalled a trip Carr took to visit a radio station in Wyoming “that was a Dell laptop essentially playing music,” and yet couldn’t merge with a local news outlet owing to ownership rules.) After Trump returned to office, the F.C.C. invited comment on all agency regulations as part of an initiative titled “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete.” Last week, I tuned in to the agency’s monthly open meeting, and the agenda sounded conventional, technical (“Proposing Application Limit in Upcoming NCE Reserved Band FM Translator Filing Window,” anyone?), and, at least to my untrained ear, dull.
Carr’s most attention-grabbing maneuvers, however, have been anything but. Since taking over the F.C.C., he has revived and reinterpreted regulations, or weaponized the threat thereof, in ways that have bent the arc of broadcast TV toward Trump, or sought to—not least in the Kimmel case. At a glance, then, his approach appears to be inconsistent. But a coherent project comes into view if you see his primary currency as leverage, over beneficiaries and targets alike. Craig Aaron, the co-C.E.O. of Free Press, a media-advocacy group that strongly opposes lifting the ownership cap, told me that the divergent strands of Carr’s approach are best understood “less as a contradiction and more as a merger.” The F.C.C. did not respond to my e-mail inviting Carr to comment, but he has described ending the ownership cap not only in free-market terms but as a means to “empower” smaller competitors to stand up to the major networks whose programming they carry, such that next time, perhaps, they have the leverage to keep a Kimmel off air permanently. (In the fall, Nexstar and Sinclair ended up reinstating his show, following talks with Disney, which owns ABC.) More overtly, Carr told the Times Magazine that a “realignment” is under way in how right-wingers conceive of using government power to achieve their objectives. “Conservatives have complained about media bias forever,” he said. “We’ve always relied on the idea that the free market would address it.” But “this sort of libertarian free-market answer isn’t working.”
If, as Aaron puts it, the “macro” explanation for the enduring importance of traditional broadcast TV is that lots of people still watch it, then the “micro” explanation is that one particular person still watches: Donald Trump. The President, of course, has taken aim at hostile late-night hosts—Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, of CBS, and Seth Meyers, of NBC—and called for major networks to have their licenses stripped. This is not exactly in Carr’s gift. But he does have other tools. One of those is an “equal time” rule which, like the TV-ownership cap, predates our current era of informational super-abundance. The rule holds that, under certain conditions, networks who host a political candidate for office must offer similar opportunities to their opponents. News programs have generally been exempt from this requirement, and in 2006 the F.C.C. extended the exemption to a late-night interview that Jay Leno conducted with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California. Late-night shows have apparently assumed themselves to be exempt ever since. But, in January, the F.C.C. put them on notice. “If you’re fake news,” Carr warned, at a press conference, “you’re not going to qualify.” He later confirmed that his agency has opened an “enforcement action” involving ABC, after “The View” aired an interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. (Carr has said that the rules apply to all broadcasters, but talk radio, a conservative-dominated medium, doesn’t appear to be in his crosshairs.)
Last week, Colbert claimed on his show that lawyers at Paramount Skydance, the owner of CBS, which has bowed to pressure from Trump and Carr before—and, as it happens, is trying to derail Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. with a bid that would require the Administration’s approval—blocked him from airing an interview with Talarico, for fear of triggering an equal-time review. CBS countered that it had not made a prohibition but merely offered advice, inciting a furious on-air rebuttal from Colbert, which ended with him scooping a printout of the network’s statement into a dog-poop bag. Colbert likened Carr to a “smug bowling pin” and mocked him for telling comedians to go do a streaming show or podcast if they want to get around F.C.C. rules. (“Great idea, man whose job is to regulate broadcast TV,” Colbert quipped. “It’s like when Arby’s changed their slogan to ‘Arby’s: Would it kill you to eat a salad?’ ”) At a press conference, Carr hit back that Talarico was peddling a “hoax,” and suggested that Colbert was bitter about his time in the “limelight” coming to an end. Colbert’s CBS show will indeed end, in May—a decision that itself has been seen as an act of supplication to Trump. (CBS has cited financial reasons.)
Carr’s jibe struck me as weirdly TV-centric, in a very Trumpian sense. There is now a vast media world beyond broadcast—as the foundational premise of the push to raise the TV-ownership cap reflects—and I suspect Colbert will easily find his place within it; last week, he followed Carr’s advice and uploaded his non-televised interview with Talarico to YouTube, where it racked up millions of views. (The video, and its attendant controversy, also got Talarico a fund-raising boost.) Various observers suggested that Colbert and Talarico had benefitted from the Streisand effect, in which attempts to censor information often only amplify it. Swarztrauber told me that both men “got out of this situation what they wanted.”
Not that this means Carr lost—I think CBS gave him what he wanted, too. The controversy unfolding made for “one of the most fun days I’ve had on the job,” he said. Talarico suggested that he had been censored directly by the government, which Carr compared to “that meme where someone with a bicycle takes a stick and pokes it through their own front wheel, and they end up crashing, and then they cry for help.” Carr accused journalists of falling for the charade. “Watching the arc of this story, it was so clear where it was gonna go,” he said. “It’s why so many people don’t trust the fake-news media anymore.” ♦
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