Trump's Sinister Attacks on CNN
Days before the Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. Department of Justice released its complaint against the proposed AT&T–Time Warner merger. The complaint is a history-making document. It announces a return to long-discarded approaches to antitrust, and argues that these old ways have regained relevance in the digital era.
The Justice Department’s arguments for this rediscovery are sophisticated and even compelling—so much so that they raise a retrospective question: If this big merger of content creators and content carriers is banned as anticompetitive, why was the previous big merger of Comcast and NBC Universal permitted? The issues raised by AT&T–Time Warner were also presented by Comcast–NBC. What has changed between then and now?
The morning after Thanksgiving, however, President Trump tweeted his latest and most outrageous attack yet on CNN, a unit of Time Warner.
. is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S.,
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
