[…]
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice approved the merger. The resulting behemoth will control two hundred and sixty-five television stations, reaching 80 percent of US households—more than double the 39 percent national audience cap allowed by law. “It’s a grotesque violation of the cap,” Diana Moss, the vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, told me. “So bottom line, Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, who clearly does the bidding of the White House, said that he would wave this merger through, and that has in fact come to pass.”
US antitrust laws are more than a hundred years old and can be split into two big statutes—the Sherman and Clayton Acts, passed in 1890 and 1914, respectively—and three areas of concern: monopolies, mergers, and anticompetitive agreements like price-fixing, Moss told me. She is part of a center-left, pro-enforcement movement founded in the 1990s by antitrust advocates in the nonprofit, academic, and enforcement communities with concerns about the economic consequences of concentration and consolidation. “Mergers that really concentrate markets and create dominant players are generally thought to be harmful to consumers,” she said. “We worked very hard in advancing that movement to get stronger guidelines, better cases, and better legal precedents.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
[…]
