News Clips

“I think the background definitely changes with a flip of the House. There is going to be more oversight, probably some attempts to draw up legislation,” said former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, now an adviser to watchdog group Common Cause.

The discrepancy is “nothing new in the sense of filing one thing with the FCC and telling the customers something else,” says Yosef Getachew of the watchdog group Common Cause, which is among advocacy groups that are fighting to block the merger.

“There was a tremendous public outcry against this merger,” said Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner who opposed media consolidation and now serves as a senior adviser to Common Cause, an opponent of the Sinclair deal. “How much influence it had on Ajit Pai, I don’t really know. I think public outcry did make a difference.”

Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps says his former agency "designates transactions for an administrative hearing when the agency can't find the transaction will serve the public interest."

But Michael Copps, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission and an adviser to Common Cause, was dismayed. “Justice denied and consumers skewered,” Copps said. “We’ve had far too much consolidation causing far too much harm to consumers.” And he predicted that the ruling would lead to still more consolidation. “There’s no constraints,” Copps said. “You’ve got the courts flashing a green light.”

Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who has loudly opposed Sinclair's $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune, says the company is "trying to look as nonthreatening as possible and make this deal look as innocuous as possible." In early May, 21st Century Fox agreed to snap up seven TV stations from Sinclair in a $910 million deal that could help Sinclair get regulatory approval for its Tribune bid. Publicly, Sinclair leadership has denied rumors of a Fox News challenge. But Copps is unmoved: "Watch what they do and not what they say."