Kansas AG Kobach is right to challenge Nexstar-TEGNA merger | Opinion
No decision in business — or politics — has just one side. Effective leaders weigh the tradeoffs and fight for the priorities that matter most. That’s what Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is doing challenging the massive Nexstar-TEGNA broadcast merger in federal court: standing up against runaway consolidation in local television that threatens to drive up costs, shut out independent voices and undermine years of conservative progress restraining federal agency overreach.
If allowed to proceed, Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of its competitor TEGNA would be the largest local TV station group merger in history. It would create a juggernaut controlling 260 stations reaching 80% of American viewers, including seven stations serving markets here in Kansas.
Nexstar says it needs this kind of scale to compete with even bigger media businesses such as Google and Facebook. As an entrepreneur in broadcast and modern media, I’m sympathetic to the secular challenges the industry is facing. We’ve all seen how the tech giants swarm new markets and smother even the most effective competitors.
But Nexstar can’t claim the only way to beat anticompetitive monopolies is to join them.
Instead, we need to fight for open markets and meaningful competition in every sector of the economy — not meekly accept extreme consolidation that shuts down innovation, decimates Main Street businesses and jobs, and warps the business landscape for the benefit of a few.
That’s exactly what Kobach is doing by challenging this flawed transaction.
This is important for Kansas families who will face big price hikes in their TV bills if a supersized Nexstar gains more leverage to dictate prices for local programming. While people think of local broadcast channels as “free,” most Kansans pay a lot every month to watch them over cable or satellite services, in fact. The retransmission fees Nexstar charges for its programming have shot up by more than 2,000% over the past 15 years. And Nexstar has already promised investors it will increase them by millions more if the TEGNA deal goes through.
Consolidation also hurts the marketplace of ideas. Local broadcast stations remain the most trusted source of information in America, but merger-driven layoffs and newsroom closures would make it impossible to continue this strong tradition of quality, independent local news.
Even worse, concentrating control over hundreds of local stations in a single company would put an enormously powerful megaphone behind just one perspective while silencing competing voices and ideas. Conservatives who have seen how Big Tech monopolies censor and even deplatform unpopular voices and ideas should be the first to reject the creation of a new local news gatekeeper.
To protect against these risks, Congress passed a law more than 20 years ago saying no single station group could reach more than 39% of American households. To approve this transaction — which vastly exceeds that limit — the Federal Communications Commission claimed the power simply to waive the law.
Federal agencies cannot just waive clear legal limits when it suits them. For this reason, too, Kobach is right to oppose the Nexstar-TEGNA deal. Conservatives understand that federal agencies must uphold the rule of law — not ignore statutes they don’t like just to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. We’ve been fighting to establish and uphold those protections against overreaching agencies for decades.
I believe in marketplace competition and private sector dealmaking. The government must take great care before it steps in to override the judgment of the marketplace. But in rare cases, government action is the only way to protect real competition from would-be monopolists and ensure private sector companies have the freedom to negotiate fair deals.
This is one of those cases. Attorney General Kobach made the right call by joining the bipartisan case against Nexstar-TEGNA.
CiCi Rojas is the founder and president of Tico Productions and Tico Sports, a Kansas-headquartered broadcast production and marketing firm. She serves as vice chair of The Latino Coalition, the country’s leading free-market advocacy organization for U.S. Hispanic businesses.