Michael J de la Merced

Twenty-First Century Fox finally got clearance on July 12 from Britain’s culture secretary to pursue its takeover of Sky, after 18 months of trying. The decision came hours after Comcast seized the lead in the bidding for the European satellite broadcaster by offering £14.75 a share. Yet it’s a different British regulator, the country’s Takeover Panel, which may have made Sky — and not Fox itself, which has drawn takeover bids from the Walt Disney Company and Comcast to expand their media empires — the center of the biggest media takeover battle today.

Comcast formally unveiled a $30.7 billion takeover bid for Sky, putting the American cable giant squarely in a takeover battle with Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox for control over the British satellite broadcaster.  The terms of the long-awaited proposal were good enough to prompt Sky to withdraw its recommendation for Fox’s $16 billion bid for the 61 percent of Sky that it does not already own.

Apparently, the Justice Department has called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell Turner Broadcasting, the group of cable channels that includes CNN, as a potential requirement for approving the companies’ pending $85.4 billion deal. The other possible way for the merger to win approval would be for AT&T to sell its DirecTV division, apparently.

The British satellite broadcaster Sky warned that it may shut down its 24-hour news channel if the property becomes an obstacle to the company’s effort to sell itself to Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.  In a regulatory filing with the Competition Markets Authority in Britain, Sky wrote that the regulator should not “simply assume the ‘continued provision of Sky News’” if ownership of the channel posed a problem for the $15 billion transaction.

The timing could not be more fortuitous for Sinclair Broadcast Group: a Republican president is in the White House, his regulators have just eased rules on owning television stations and the dominant name in conservative media is reeling from a sexual harassment scandal. But as Sinclair tries to expand by buying even more local television stations, it has locked horns with that other broadcast giant known for its political bent, 21st Century Fox. Now the battle for a bigger audience is on, as Sinclair and Fox each look to broaden their reach in the Trump era.

Deal makers took notice in Oct when Donald Trump declared that he would seek to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner on the grounds that it would radically concentrate power in too few companies. But after an initial period of turmoil, deal advisers say that it is unclear whether a Trump administration — led by an avowedly pro-business real estate mogul — would really make life difficult for mega-mergers.

At the moment, AT&T’s planned takeover of Time Warner, the biggest merger of the year and one that is poised to reshape the world of media and telecommunications, appears to be the most likely candidate for hazing. The president-elect was among the first politicians to criticize the deal, vowing to block it if he became president. President-elect Trump said it was “an example of the power structure I’m fighting.” He also opposed a similar union between Comcast and NBCUniversal in 2013, which he called “poison.” But antitrust specialists and Republican strategists say a Trump administration may not fulfill his campaign promises.