AT&T could be forced to sell off CNN or DirecTV if the Justice Department is to permit its purchase of Time Warner.
The $85.4 billion deal to create a media giant with interests stretching from broadband delivery through to news and entertainment appeared to be a shoo-in. But on Wednesday tensions emerged between the Justice Department and AT&T that centred around a possible sale of CNN, the news network labelled by President Trump as a purveyor of so-called ‘Fake News’.
In a meeting with Justice Department officials on Monday, the sale of CNN was put forward as a possible concession to allow the sale to proceed. An alternative was to dispose of satellite platform DirecTV, purchased just two years ago at a cost of $49 billion, but whose presence represents the essence of the deal AT&T and Time Warner executives.
There are differing accounts of the meeting, one suggesting AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson himself proposed a CNN sell-off, a possibility that Stephenson subsequently denied yesterday after a statement from the Justice Department.
President Trump, who has claimed CNN to be biased against him, has spoken against the deal. But in an indication of the direction of his administration’s anti-trust policy he has also been critical of the Comcast-NBC tie-up.
What many media observers in the United States are now asking is whether the President is taking the opportunity to crush what he perceives to be a rival.