Saturday Rewind: Blocking the broadcast 'behemoth'
California AG Rob Bonta just succeeded in extending an order blocking Nexstar's merger with TEGNA. He told All Rise News why that fight matters.
What happened during the short time when Donald Trump entered the Supreme Court to attend oral arguments over a central pillar of his immigration policy, his attempt to ban birthright citizenship, and watched that scheme seem to collapse before his eyes?
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who was part of the coalition that sued over the ban, sat in the same row with Trump when it took place.
“He was sort of hunched over, elbows on knees, looking at his hands at times,” Bonta told All Rise News in a video interview, adding that Trump seemed to be there only to intimidate the justices with his presence.
The act of witnessing events in courthouses and state houses across the country matters, and Bonta notes it’s being threatened by media consolidation, which is why he filed an antitrust lawsuit opposing Nexstar’s merger with fellow broadcast giant TEGNA.
On Friday night, a federal judge extended an order blocking the merger for another week.
If completed, the merged Nexstar and TEGNA would reach more than 80 percent of U.S. households through their network of total TV satellite stations, mostly branded as Big Four affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.
“When you have a consolidation of local broadcast news, you're going to see job loss and then you're going to see a diminishing of perspectives — of voices, of storytellers, of witnesses to the news — to a particular angle in the news or a particular story or a particular interest,” Bonta told All Rise News.
As California’s AG, Bonta noted that the effect of the merger was immediate and hit close to home with layoffs at KTLA, the Nexstar-owned Los Angeles channel.
“So this isn’t just an intellectual exercise or an imagined outcome. It’s happening and more of it will happen,” he said. “There will be less people to bear witness and less people to story tell and less perspectives being shared.”
Watch my interview with Bonta in full on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
Below the paywall
AG Bonta on Trump’s behavior at SCOTUS and green lights to monopolies.
Scholar Jamie Rowen goes deeper on Trump, “madman theory” and the 25th Amendment.
Why some have speculated that Alina Habba is jockeying for the AG slot.
