Since he retook office, President Donald Trump has continued to attack free and independent press. The most obvious instance was his billions in cuts to public media last summer in the Big Beautiful Bill.  

Those cuts have led the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shut down and triggered layoffs at public media stations all over the U.S.

But you may not be familiar with the other way President Trump is hurting our free and independent press: supporting corporate mergers of entities that his donors own or have a conversative bias. 

The latest example is the attempted merger of TEGNA and Nexstar, which would mean Nexstar would own 80 percent of local TV affiliates across key markets if approved. Trump has announced his support for the deal.   

If Nexstar sounds familiar, they recently joined another conservative ownership group in trying to get Jimmy Kimmel removed from his late-night show, which ABC did do temporarily. Kimmel was returned to the air after outcry from Common Cause and others to “turn off Disney” if Kimmel didn’t get his show back.  

If the merger is approved, this would follow two other Trump-supported mergers  by his donors, the Ellisons, who’s Paramount companies took over CBS, canceling Stephen Colbert’s show et hiring a conservative editor as newsroom boss. Paramount also just had the winning bid for Warner Bros., meaning CNN could soon also be under the Ellison’s conservative control.   

All of these attacks on our free and independent press are alarming, which is why we need to make sure public pressure kills the TEGNA-Nexstar deal. Here are three key reasons to contact the FCC and Congress and ask them to stop the merger.  

1. It’s against the law for one company to monopolize the market 

Congress put market caps in for a reason — they knew having one voice controlling the news was bad. The combined Nexstar/TEGNA operation would control 265 TV stations, reaching 80% of U.S. households in key markets — far beyond the caps Congress set to protect local voices. Nexstar/TEGNA want a waiver to merge, but the FCC should enforce the law and reject the merger. 

2. Nexstar forces stations to run recycled and self-interested political content.  

Studies identify Nexstar as the worst offender for duplicative news — identical scripts aired across multiple stations in the same market. That’s not local free press, that’s top– down decision making. Also, Nexstar orders stations to air corporate political content — including segments urging the public to support ownership rule changes that would enable this very merger.

3.Local job losses will mount if merger approved 

From year-end 2019 to year-end 2024, Nexstar cut a staggering 4,420 jobs representing nearly 20 percent of its total workforce. 

People trust local reporters who live in their communities for news. When those jobs are cut, communities lose income and people lose that access to fair, independent reporting. We know that’s the point for the Ellisons and Nexstar, but we can’t let it happen without a fight. 
 

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