EUROPEAN LEGISLATORS JOIN MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN SCRUTINIZING PARAMOUNT-WBD MERGER

Nexstar Media Group is the largest owner of local television stations in the United States, operating hundreds of stations affiliated with major broadcast networks such as NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox across both large and mid-sized media markets. As local television faces growing competition from streaming platforms, social media, and digital advertising markets, traditional cable and broadcast revenue models have weakened.

The merger with TEGNA Inc. would expand Nexstar’s national footprint, adding major-market stations, increasing operational scale, and allowing the company to spread the enormous, fixed costs of local broadcasting — newsrooms, meteorologists, investigative reporting teams, live production infrastructure, transmission systems, and sports rights — across a larger network.

In economic terms, local television is a classic high-fixed-cost industry where scale can lower average costs and improve long-run sustainability in an increasingly fragmented media environment. That is why both the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice reviewed the $6.2 billion transaction and cleared it on March 19, 2026. These federal agencies evaluate communications mergers by weighing market competition, consumer welfare, and broader public-interest considerations. 

For a group of state attorneys general and a satellite company to then seek to block the transaction after federal approval creates a duplicative layer of uncertainty on top of the review process federal law already established. Critics of the merger argue that a larger Nexstar could wield greater retransmission bargaining power against cable and satellite providers, allowing it to negotiate higher carriage fees for the local broadcast stations distributors rely on to retain subscribers. DIRECTV’s incentives here are also straightforward: lower retransmission fees improve distributor margins. 

While economic scale does create leverage, focusing exclusively on retransmission fees ignores the economics of the modern media landscape. Local broadcasters are no longer competing primarily against one another.  

They are competing against streaming platforms, social media companies, YouTube, and digital advertising giants that have fundamentally reshaped media consumption and siphoned away advertising revenue that once sustained local journalism. Reuters found that the share of the public getting news from television in a given week dropped from 72% in 2013 to just 50% in 2025, while the share turning to social media for daily news doubled to 54% over the same period. The real competition is Google, Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and streaming platforms that capture advertising revenue while producing virtually no local journalism themselves. 

While people still crave local news, the loss of local journalism has consequences far beyond television ratings.  

As local coverage declines, audiences increasingly substitute toward national partisan outlets and algorithm-driven social media feeds that prioritize outrage and ideological conflict over local governance. The result is a population less informed about schools, taxes, infrastructure, and city councils, and more absorbed in national political tribalism.

There is also a broader institutional issue about the growing willingness of state attorneys general to second-guess and effectively override federal regulatory determinations in industries traditionally governed through national frameworks.

Banking regulators, communications regulators, and federal antitrust agencies exist because markets such as broadcasting, finance, and telecommunications operate across state lines and require consistent national standards rather than fifty separate political interpretations.

Broadcast markets, in particular, function through nationally integrated systems involving television signals, advertising markets, network affiliations, spectrum allocation, licensing, and retransmission negotiations that extend far beyond any single state’s borders. Congress, therefore, placed oversight in the hands of expert federal agencies capable of balancing competition concerns with technical, economic, and public-interest considerations.

ALLEGIANT AND SUN COUNTRY MERGE TO FILL BUDGET-AIRLINE GAP LEFT BY SPIRIT

The FCC and DOJ conducted the review process Congress established, and courts should be cautious about allowing that process to be effectively unraveled through post-hoc litigation.  

More fundamentally, policymakers and state attorneys general cannot claim to care about the decline of local journalism while simultaneously undermining the scale local broadcasters increasingly need to survive. In a media environment dominated by massive digital platforms that capture advertising dollars without producing local reporting, weakening local television risks accelerating the decline of one of the few remaining sources of shared community-level information in American life.

Danielle Zanzalari is an assistant professor of Economics at Seton Hall University. She frequently researches public finance, antitrust, and an array of economic efficiency issues.