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How it started
A long time ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission laid down a rule designed to prevent a monopoly: No one company could broadcast to more than 39 percent of all the TV households in the United States. But then Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became FCC chairman and immediately kicked off a deregulatory initiative called “Delete, Delete, Delete,” in which Carr vowed to get rid of “every rule, regulation, or guidance document” that placed “unnecessary regulatory burdens” on companies. And within months, Nexstar, which already owned over 200 stations nationwide and had hit its ownership cap, announced that it had entered an agreement to purchase its rival, Tegna, for an estimated $6.2 billion — something that could only happen, however, 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 over 80 percent of the market, it’d point to Big Tech as the culprit. As advertisers take their money to Netflix, YouTube, and other digital streamers, linear television — the local television news, the broadcast affiliates, the basic cable networks — has suffered, forcing them to consolidate and shut down newsrooms. In that sense, Nexstar argued, the merger would help it compete for ad revenue with the streaming services, thereby building more robust local journalism. However, the merger’s opponents believe that this is a basic violation of antitrust laws and principles — not to mention the danger of letting one company have editorial control over the vast majority of America’s local television newsrooms.
But the second Trump administration handles 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 up) to Trump directly. And when Nexstar did so publicly, it confirmed its opponents’ fears about political influence. Last September, in the fraught weeks after the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, Nexstar announced 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. It briefly led to ABC suspending Kimmel’s show, though ABC and Nexstar soon reversed their decision after a massive nationwide backlash and an ABC boycott.
However, Nexstar’s loyalty to Trump himself was not enough to win over his most powerful MAGA supporters. Newsmax, a cable news network with a deeply pro-Trump bent, and its CEO, longtime Trump donor and outside adviser Chris Ruddy, filed a lawsuit objecting to the merger, claiming that Nexstar’s anticompetitive behavior would force channels like his off the air with steeper carriage fees. He specifically accused Nexstar of jacking up the fees for stations to carry Newsmax, while offering its similar network, NewsNation, for much cheaper.
The Nexstar-Tegna MAGA makeover then took a more subtle turn. NewsNation hired the pro-Trump Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich and gave her her own primetime show. (The network had already hired a slew of former Fox journalists as well.) Around this time, a political group called Keep News Local began airing ads in DC that seemed to directly address Trump, praising him for having “defeated the fake news monopolies before through independent voices and local news” and claiming that the Nexstar-Tegna merger was “crucial for MAGA to survive.” (A little self-contradictory and mildly illogical, but it’s the kind of stuff that Trump likes to hear.) When I last spoke to Ruddy in February, I asked if he’d worried that the dark money going into Keep News Local would sway 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’s going to be influenced by an ad campaign.”
For months, no one could accurately predict if Trump would override Carr’s wishes and bless the deal, as he’s often done for other companies facing regulatory scrutiny. Trump’s Truth Social posts about the merger have been a good indicator of how precarious the merger has been and who’s been able to influence him at any given moment: Last November, he blasted the deal as an “EXPANSION OF THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS,” but by February, he posted that the deal would “help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition.”
Several current and former NewsNation employees told Status at the time that they feared that the parent company was steering NewsNation away from the centrist, “unbiased” reputation they’d long cultivated. “A lot of people within the network believe that the network has gone hard right to appeal to Trump and Brendan Carr,” one former employee told Status. Coincidentally, days before the deal was finalized, NewsNation began ramping up its explicitly pro-Trump content, tweeting a clip of CNN’s Kaitlan Collins being berated by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, along with the comment “Just going to leave this here.”
How it’s going
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