News

If you want to understand how AT&T’s proposed $85-billion purchase of Time Warner might affect you, you only have to be a Taylor Swift fan.

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, the Department of Justice moved to block AT&T’s $85.4-billion takeover of Time Warner on antitrust grounds.

Federal regulators took steps Thursday to ease broadcast-ownership restrictions, a move seen as favorable for the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune Media.

Poor people would be cut off from their communities and from potential employers under a proposal approved Thursday to dramatically shrink a program Ronald Reagan created to subsidize phone service for the destitute.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, critics warn, is aiming to “destroy the internet as we know it and give even more gatekeeper power to a few huge companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.”

WASHINGTON — The FCC voted along party lines on Thursday to move forward plans to eviscerate the Lifeline program, which provides a modest $9.25 monthly subsidy to most recipients so that millions of poor people can connect to communications services.

Injecting President Donald Trump’s business-friendly, anti-regulation urges into the media business, the Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission approved sweeping rollbacks of rules designed to limit monopoly control of local broadcast properties.

In an age of massive deregulation, will fact-based journalism become an endangered species?

The Lifeline service, which aims to give broadband to low-income people, has been derided by conservatives.

The FCC voted along party lines Thursday to permit broadcasters to own multiple TV stations in every market, regardless of size, by eliminating the so-called eight-voice test.