'The Pressure Is Working': Watchdogs Welcome FCC's 'Serious Concerns' With Sinclair-Tribune Merger

“The pressure is working!” declared the advocacy group Free Press, a critic of media consolidation, in response to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai’s remarks on Monday that he has “serious concerns” about right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed $3.9 billion merger with Tribune Media.

In a statement (pdf) announcing a draft order that would require merger applicants to attend a hearing in front of an administrative law judge, Pai said Monday: “Based on a thorough review of the record, I have serious concerns about the Sinclair/Tribune transaction. The evidence we’ve received suggests that certain station divestitures that have been proposed to the FCC would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law.”

“This is a giant win for the public, and a huge setback for Sinclair’s mega-merger plans.”
—Matt Wood, Free Press

Reuters reported that the FCC has the three votes needed to approve Pai’s proposal, and the draft order—which has not been publicly released—notes that “Sinclair’s actions here potentially involve deception” and possible “misconduct.”

“This is a giant win for the public, and a huge setback for Sinclair’s mega-merger plans,” responded Free Press policy director Matt Wood.

“Public outcry has been building over Sinclair’s takeover of local television for months. Just last week, Common Cause and its allies delivered over 600,000 signatures to the FCC urging the agency to block Sinclair’s merger,” noted Michael Copps, Common Cause special adviser and a former FCC commissioner. “The message is loud and clear: local news should reflect the concerns and interests of the communities they serve, not the will of a wealthy, powerful few. Sinclair’s merger would make it too large and too powerful.”

Although the Communications Act requires that the FCC allow applicants to argue their case before a merger can be denied, as Wood explained, “it is extremely rare for transactions to be sent to a hearing in the first place, much less for parties to fight it out and beat the FCC in that hearing. That’s why analysts and investors rightly see today’s news as potentially a fatal blow for this merger.”

In other words, an approved hearing order kicks off “a lengthy administrative process often viewed as a deal-killer,” Politico pointed out. “The agency used the same move in 2015 with the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, which the companies abandoned rather than go through the hearing process.”