Ever since a federal judge hit the pause button in April on Nexstar‘s big bucks merger with Tegna, the Texas-based local TV giant vowed to fight back on antitrust allegations and claims it played political footies with the Trump administration.
Corporate walls had to suddenly be put in place over the past few months with Tegna for what the Perry Sook-run company was treating as a $6.2 billion, FCC approved done deal. Today Nexstar made their move — and went for the biggest blast radius possible.
“Plaintiffs have no answer to the question this appeal presents: how can a locality-based theory of harm justify a nationwide preliminary injunction?” Nexstar’s Morrison & Foerster attorneys ask in the just filed 50-page reply brief. “Plaintiffs cannot explain why freezing every element of Nexstar and former-TEGNA’s integration is necessary to address the only two harms they allege—higher retransmission rates and ‘degraded’ local news—purportedly caused by Big-Four-station overlaps in only 31 of the country’s 210 television-viewing regions, or DMAs.”
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The San Fran, DC and NYC-based Morrison and Foerster added: “To be clear, Nexstar vigorously disputes Plaintiffs’ flawed claims and is confident the full record after discovery and trial will confirm that no aspect of the TEGNA acquisition violates antitrust law. But Nexstar cannot wait a year or more without relief from the overbroad injunction that every day costs millions, drains resources, and sends valuable employees packing — and puts Nexstar and former-TEGNA on the back foot in an industry where they face fierce competition from much bigger players, including DIRECTV.”
AKA: Don’t mess with our money or our time. We have word-that-rhymes-with-hit to do.
In conjunction with its filing to slice up the so-called “overbroad” sea-to-shining-sea injunction, Nexstar also offered some jabs today at Blue State AGs and suing competitor DirecTV outside U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley’s court docket.
“We look forward to the oral argument before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,” a company spokesperson told Deadline Wednesday.
“DIRECTV and the State AGs are peddling the fiction that this lawsuit is about protecting local media and viewers when it is actually a cynical attempt to advance their own commercial and political interests,” they added, putting down a red line of sorts literally and figuratively. “This lawsuit is rooted in an outdated view of the media space and wastes precious taxpayer dollars to protect private equity-owned DIRECTV, while giving Big Tech and streaming platforms a free pass. Every day this overbroad injunction remains in place, it starves local broadcast stations of the investment they need while undermining the local journalism it purports to protect.”
Already running the largest portfolio of local TV stations in the country, Nexstar aimed to create a broadcast station Goliath with the Tegna merger. Together, the united company would have 259 stations in total, reaching about 80% of the country. As part of the FCC’s fast-tracked approval of the deal earlier this year, the Brendan Carr-run agency handed Nexstar a unique waiver from the national ownership cap, which prohibits any one entity from owning stations reaching more than 39% of TV households.
With that Get-Past-The-Regulations card, the merger allowed Nexstar to take control of additional “big four” stations in 31 markets where it already has one or more outlets. The merged company would have 27 new duopolies, where it would own two stations in a market, and three new triopolies, where it would own three.
To that, Nexstar closed its acquisition of Tegna on March 19, shortly after the FCC signed off on the deal. However, within 24 hours, a group of state attorneys general, including from California and New York, filed suit to block the transaction. DirecTV also sued to halt the deal. Days after that suit was filed, Judge Nunley granted the temporary restraining order on the transaction. In the order, the judge ruled that DirecTV established “a likelihood of success on the merits” in its claim. He also stated moving forward with the multi-billion dollar transaction would create “irreparable harm.”
The injunction insisted that Nexstar and Tegna assets remain distinct, freezing and undoing efforts to combine the companies that had already begun. Nexstar’s lawyers called that freeze, as seen above, an “overbroad injunction that every day costs millions, drains resources, and sends valuable employees packing.”
DirecTV’s case later was consolidated with the states’ cases.
In April, as the preliminary injunction was unveiled, CA AG Rob Bonta (who is up in the face of a bushel of MAGA approved mergers and acquisitions) told Deadline that “this merger is illegal, plain and simple.” The reelection-running AG went on to take a shot at Trumpland: “The federal government may have thrown in the towel, but we’ll keep fighting for consumers, for workers, for affordability, and for our local news.”
Neither Bonta’s office nor that of Empire State AG Letitia James replied to Deadline’s request Wednesday for comment on Nexstar’s barbed filing. Maybe, with more states (including a Red one) joining their action, they are keeping their powder dry for a reply of their own in court. Maybe.
