Never though I would be on the side of AT&T or a cable company.
You can oppose the AT&T merger and also call bullshit on the whitehouse if that does turn out to be the motivator here. They aren't mutually exclusive.
I find it shady if that's the only reason for this happening. But mostly just shady because it hasn't taken place in previous deals where it should have.
However... That doesn't mean I'm any less against the AT&T merger.
The DOJ is asking for either DirecTV or Turner Broadcasting be excluded from the deal, because being under the same roof would be a huge boost to DirectTV over its competitors - cable companies and Dish Network.
Turner Broadcasting includes several channels. Both TNT and TBS are probably more important to the deal than CNN (the former has higher ratings than CNN across the board; the latter does in primetime); the idea that it's the sole focus for DOJ is highly questionable.
Furthermore, how does DOJ's actual demand hurt CNN? AT&T could spin out Time Warner and keep the Turner channels. Or even if Time Warner spun out the Turner channels, they wouldn't go away (they were independent of Time Warner in the 1990s).
I'm as anti-Trump as the next guy, but the idea that there's not a rational basis for DOJ's demand is simply mistaken.
The reason AT&T is purchasing Time Warner is to gain their content production capability. You don't see how forcing the sale of a major part of that would affect AT&T's reasons for even doing the merger?
The issue with forcing the spin off of Turner isn't the believe that Turner including CNN would somehow no longer exist. It is the believe that it is being to done for political purposes to allow a journalistic outlet critical of the administration to be purchased by an organization friendly to it.
This along with the FCC media ownership changes are despot 101, gain control of the media.
What I'm saying is that "Trump doesn't like CNN" is a silly explanation for DOJ wanting either AT&T to spin off DTV or for Time Warner to spin off Turner Broadcasting.
Maybe the latter scenario somehow influences CNN's coverage, but it's an extremely tenuous link.
Alright, give us your best pitch.
How do you see this happening, Trump calls DOJ and tells them to block AT&T merger because of CNN?
Any is it all of the sudden these people started loving monopolies. "Well DOJ wants to something about, we clearly have to oppose it and support exactly the opposite".
The same thing happened with the TPP. Every Bernie supporter was against TPP. As soon as the White House pulled out of the TPP, I saw messages on /r/politics about "Well, we can't support it now once that Trump did it", it wasn't even ironic.
Apropos DNC + Russia hack evidence:
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
You have that low faith in the FBI/CIA/NSAs conclusion?
Also CrowdStrike security firm isn't the only one, it is also Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks and ThreatConnect.
I'm completely open to being wrong on this though, it just seems like the body of evidence points in a particular direction.
You can be on the same side for different reasons. Always going for the opposite of your enemy is a dangerous tactic.