October 2016

There is considerable skepticism already about the AT&T-Time Warner tie-up. The total transaction is valued at $108.7 billion (including Time Warner debt) and some financial analysts fear AT&T will take on too much debt in the process.

Of course Time Warner is no stranger to controversial deals, They were a part of what many believe was the worst failed corporate merger in history, AoL-Time Warner, which at the time cited many of the same benefits AT&T now cites as motivation for the deal. There are also valid concerns regarding the regulatory climate for such a deal. Will regulators approve the deal at all? Or if they do, will they burden it with so many conditions that it ends up being more trouble than its worth. One area sure to receive significant scrutiny is exclusivity of Time Warner content. AT&T already allows DIRECTV programming to flow across its mobile network without counting towards a subscriber’s monthly data allowance. Regulators will surely frown upon that and will probably dictate conditions that block such behavior. Comcast has conditions on their NBC Universal deal that aim to prevent exclusivity of content. There is also a change of Federal Communications Commission leadership to come, due to the presidential election and one candidate, Trump, has already signaled he would oppose the deal if elected. Hillary Clinton had not yet commented at this post’s publishing. Regulatory approval is no slam dunk for this deal.

In the end, I guess you could finally say Steve Case was right. Case led AOL to great power in the 1990s, and he then presided over what has become known as one of the worst mergers of all time, when he combined his high-flying Internet giant with Time Warner, back at the turn of the century. It was a truly epic move, all predicated on the very big idea that distribution and content had to marry in the digital age and that whoever did that successfully would rule the next era of media and more. It was also an epic failure, brought down by a toxic combination of timing and execution.
Which is to say that the body of Time Warner — made up of the mandarins of media whose power was waning, although they did not know it at the time — rejected the deal almost immediately and made sure it would never succeed, even as the fast-and-loose slicksters of AOL did everything possible to seem as lightweight as they still were at the time. You could write books on what went wrong — and I did — which raises the question of what Time Warner now thinks will go right in the deal it just struck with telecom giant AT&T to be taken out for $85 billion. As expected, the media has gone wild, dragged along breathlessly as they are for any holy-god deal, nearly forgetting that some of its current principals were the very same people who had been the biggest critics of the match-up of Time Warner and AOL.

Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and her progressive allies are pushing Hillary Clinton to curb the market power of tech giants like Apple, Amazon and Google - putting the Democratic nominee in a bind over how hard to police an industry that's showered her with money and support in 2016. If she wins in November, Clinton would have to fill a raft of positions at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, the government's twin cops on the competition beat.

The tech industry - which has largely avoided major showdowns with Washington's antitrust regulators during the Obama Administration - could easily face new scrutiny if Clinton bows to the Sen Warren wing and appoints people with a tougher eye for enforcement." Another name being circulated for a Clinton antitrust position is Daniel Weitzner, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served in key roles at the Commerce Department and the White House during Obama's presidency. There's also chatter about whether Sharis Pozen, now the vice president for competition at GE, could return to government. During her tenure as acting assistant attorney general at DOJ, she oversaw the agency's landmark effort to block AT&T's proposed purchase of T-Mobile - and she also brought DOJ's successful case against Apple for the way it priced its ebooks. Two Federal Communications Commission aides - Gigi Sohn , an adviser to Chairman Tom Wheeler, and Travis LeBlanc, the agency's enforcement chief - are also seen as contenders for an FTC commissioner post.

A Q&A with Dave Levinthal, a writer for the Center for Public Integrity.

During the 2016 election, journalists have become part of the story in an unprecedented way. GOP Candidate Donald Trump has levied repeated accusations that the media is biased, insulting them and even barring them from covering his events. He seemed to find proof for this rallying cry in an article written by Dave Levinthal and Michael Beckel for the Center for Public Integrity. The story shows that of very few self-identified journalists who have given money to a presidential candidate, 96 percent gave to Hilary Clinton. The piece quickly flew around the Internet, aided in part by Donald Trump. It’s long been a rule in journalism that reporters should not donate to political campaigns. But the story’s examples left many underwhelmed. We spoke with Levinthal about how his story, as well as how campaign coverage during this election has changed given the media’s role in the spotlight. He said, "If there's anything, I think, to be taken from that it's that there really isn't much of a standard practice across the news industry when you throw publications large and small, when you throw in radio, television, online print, be it what it may. It really just depends on the news organization itself."