Trump opposition to AT&T/Time Warner deal was personal revenge – report

Few would consider Donald Trump a conventional President but attempting to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner to get revenge for poor coverage would be another level.

Trump’s distaste for CNN is widely known, though The New Yorker is now claiming the President’s opposition to AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner was little more than a personal vendetta against the newsroom for poor coverage as opposed to an ideological protest against market consolidation. We’re not too sure whether to be surprised by such an accusation, such is the dramatic impact to the status quo Trump has had on politics.

It is claimed President Trump was attempting to pressure the Department of Justice into blocking the monstrous acquisition as revenge for the negative news coverage on Time Warner-owned CNN. According to The New Yorker, in a meeting with Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and former Chief of Staff John Kelly, the President said:

“I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened. I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked.” Gary Cohn was, at the time, the Director of the National Economic Council – the main Presidential policy-making forum for economic matters.

The New Yorker then goes onto to claim Cohn resisted the push from the President, with aides suggesting he did not understand the ‘nuances’ of antitrust and competition law.  The Department of Justice did eventually file its complaints, though these were eventually overturned by a Federal Judge, with the DoJ then turning to the court of appeals.

It’s worth noting is that The New Yorker is not a friend of President Trump. Owned by Conde Nast, the editors are apparently given complete freedom from the parent company, with the publication having endorsed Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election. The main topic of the New Yorker piece was an investigation into the relationship between right-leaning Fox News and President Trump.

While there certainly is a left-sided slant, it is also a highly respected title which has never failed a fact check according to the Media Bias/Fact Check website. This should not be considered as unusual as there are very few (if any) mainstream media titles in the US (or worldwide for that matter) which can honestly state they are impartial; there is always some sort of political bias.

What this does indicate is the growing, and not always positive, influence of politics of the TMT segments. Although politicians might have been slow off the mark in regard to the digital euphoria, they are certainly catching up quickly. Mass market communication has dramatically shifted away from traditional media in recent years, and the politicians are following the wake.

For AT&T, this is a headache which it will be happy to put in the past. Last week, a US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit rejected an appeal from the Department of Justice challenging the Federal Judge which overturned its complaint against the acquisition. The DoJ claimed AT&T would have “both the incentive and the ability to raise its rivals’ costs and stifle growth of innovative, next-generation entrants”, though the Federal Judge and the appeals court dismissed the antitrust claims.

The number of lawsuits, counter-lawsuits and appeals has now created an incredibly complicated timeline, but there does not seem to be many routes of resistance left. Sooner or later, AT&T will be able to start figuring out how to recoup the $107 billion it decided to spend on Game of Thrones.