Is Trump Good For Businesses? President Criticizes AT&T-Time Warner Deal As Bad For 'Competition In The Marketplace'

Providing some regulatory relief for AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc., Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai told the Wall Street Journal Monday that he would not review the two companies’ proposed $85.4 billion merger. But while the Justice Department will be the lone agency overseeing the deal, AT&T and Time Warner may face pushback from the White House.

AT&T’s buyout of the New York-based multinational media company would not involve the transfer of any airwave licenses, which was “the regulatory hook for FCC review,” Pai said while speaking to a Journal reporter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

President Donald Trump hinted at his opposition to the merger, which involves the parent company of CNN.

“I don’t want to comment on any specific deal, but I do believe there has to be competition in the marketplace and maybe even more so with the media because it would be awfully bad after years if we ended up having one voice out there,” Trump said Monday in an interview with the alt-right website Breitbart News, once presided over by his chief strategist Stephen Bannon. “You have to have competition in the marketplace and you have to have competition among the media. And I’m not commenting on any one deal, but you need competition generally and you certainly need it with media.”

Trump referred to CNN as “fake news” following a challenging question from its White House correspondent Jim Acosta in January and has leaned on the label since then. After lambasting AT&T and Time Warner throughout the 2016 campaign and promising to block the merger in October, he remained opposed to the deal about two weeks ahead of his inauguration, as did Bannon, Bloomberg reported at the time, citing “people close to” Trump.

Aside from Trump’s animosity toward Time Warner’s cable news asset, the president and his family also have a longstanding relationship with the family of Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox News parent company News Corporation, who failed to acquire Time Warner in 2014.

Murdoch, who was once critical of Trump early on in the president’s campaign, has reportedly expressed interest in lobbying for the former reality TV star to place restrictions on the deal.