GET THAT DEAL DONE: A Television Heist in Seven Months Flat

The thing about local TV news is that it used to be the connective tissue of American democracy — the place where, on a Thursday at eleven, a gray-haired anchor would tell you the school board approved the redistricting plan, or that your city councilman had been indicted on a warrant from 1987. The place where someone showed up. The place that was, at minimum, there.

That era ended on a Wednesday in mid-March 2026, when Nexstar Media Group finalized its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna — apparently some hours before the FCC and DOJ announced they had approved it.

Let that sentence sit for a moment. Breathe through it. I'll wait.

Nexstar already owned stations in 44 states. Now, with Tegna absorbed, it controls 265 local TV stations reaching 80% of American households. Federal competition law from 2004 caps this kind of concentrated ownership at less than half that reach — roughly 39% of the national audience. The FCC, under Chair Brendan Carr, issued a waiver. No commission vote. No public comment period. Just a quiet sign-off from the agency's media bureau, like a permission slip forged in the copy room.

For scale: The FCC took fifteen months to block Sinclair's attempted $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune Media. It took a full year to approve Skydance's $6 billion Paramount deal. The Nexstar/Tegna merger — larger than both, and carrying antitrust implications that made competition lawyers reach for their beta blockers — cleared in seven months. You could grow a child from conception to ambulatory toddler in the time it usually takes the FCC to approve a deal this size. Carr did it before the kid could walk.

The machinery of this approval is worth understanding. In February, Trump posted on Truth Social: "GET THAT DEAL DONE!" Four hours later — four hours — Carr echoed the call on X: "The national networks like Comcast & Disney have amassed too much power." This is the FCC chair commenting publicly on a pending regulatory matter he is supposed to adjudicate independently. Four hours. I would put the over/under on whether Carr drafted that post himself at 2.5 seconds.

The groundwork had been laid earlier. When Carr publicly suggested that ABC's Jimmy Kimmel should be "forced out" over on-air remarks, Nexstar quietly pulled Kimmel from every ABC affiliate it owned. The man's face vanished from their stations. Kimmel eventually returned. The signal had been sent. NewsNation, Nexstar's cable news operation, also recently hired pro-Trump conservative commentator Katie Pavlich for her own prime-time slot — the latest in a parade of former Fox News talent finding warm reception there. These were not coincidences. This is how it works now: you demonstrate alignment before you ask for the favor.

Nexstar founder and CEO Perry Sook thanked Trump, Carr, and the Justice Department in his official statement. He did not mention the journalists. He did not need to — the $300 million in annual "synergies" he promised investors does most of the talking. In the media industry, "synergy" is a technical term that means layoffs. There is a 71% chance Sook used the word "ecosystem" on the same slide deck that promised those synergies. I have read the SEC filing. He absolutely said "enhanced scale."

Nexstar took on $5 billion in debt to finance this acquisition. The company had already begun cutting at WGN-TV in Chicago earlier this year in anticipation of servicing that debt. Tegna CEO Mike Steib — who was, until recently, running the company that no longer exists — cashed out $22.6 million on the very day Tegna was absorbed into Nexstar. He is not available for comment. He is doing fine.

And then there is Chief Judge Troy Nunley of the Eastern U.S. District Court of California, sitting in Sacramento, who appears to be the last adult in a room that has otherwise been thoroughly depopulated of adults.

Eight states' attorneys general filed suit arguing that Nexstar's control of 80% of the national TV audience constitutes a monopolistic consolidation that violates federal antitrust law. DirecTV — which pays individual Nexstar stations to carry their broadcasts and now faces negotiations with a company that reaches four in five American homes — filed separately. Chief Judge Nunley combined the suits and temporarily blocked Nexstar from operating the Tegna stations.

This is where it gets genuinely strange. Tegna no longer exists. It was dissolved before anyone objected. The judge is now trying to restrain a company from operating stations that legally belong to it, acquired from a company that has ceased to exist, in a deal that was closed before it was officially approved. Nexstar's legal team told the court the deal cannot be undone. "Tegna is no more," they argued, with the confidence of someone who has already eaten the evidence.

Media lawyer Andrew Jay Schwartzman — a veteran of these fights and not a man given to hyperbole — described Nexstar's strategy with clinical precision:

"At the very least, Nexstar and their lawyers exercised very questionable judgment in proceeding in the manner in which they did. They rushed to close the transaction, apparently hoping this could avoid judicial review. In fact, it seems to have inflamed the judge and resulted in a more harsh ruling than might have otherwise been the case."

The judge said Nexstar had exercised "very questionable judgment." In court. On the record. Nexstar's lead attorney, Alex Okuliar, argued — with a straight face — that owning 265 stations does not actually give Nexstar more bargaining leverage than owning fewer stations. "We don't think that an increase in the number of stations necessarily results in an increase in bargaining leverage," he said. This line has the structural integrity of a screen door on a submarine, but he said it anyway, in federal court, to a federal judge who appears to have already made up his mind.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser put it more simply: "We want a robust dissemination of ideas from different sources." He said this to NPR in November, before any suits were filed, in a tone that suggested he was already exhausted by what was coming.

Here is what Nexstar has promised for the newsrooms: consolidation of programming teams in markets where it now owns more than one major affiliate. Journalists at former Tegna stations, speaking anonymously because their employer now technically does not exist, expect mass layoffs. The stations are being told to take content from NewsNation rather than the national networks — an arrangement that echoes Carr's stated desire to push back against ABC, NBC, CBS, and the rest of the big-network infrastructure. The stations will still carry the network morning and evening news. For everything else: NewsNation. Katie Pavlich's prime-time show. The algorithm of approved opinion.

Judge Nunley is expected to rule in coming days. He has not indicated which way he is leaning, except by saying — in open court, to a room full of lawyers who knew they were being watched — that Nexstar's judgment was "very questionable."

The newsrooms are cooked. The question the court will answer is whether anyone gets paid to unscramble the egg.

Perry Sook will be fine either way. He already thanked everyone who matters.