Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Hearing on Corrupt Trump Antitrust Deals Driving Media Consolidation and Higher Costs for Consumers
Washington, D.C. (June 10, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a subcommittee hearing examining how politically driven and corrupt Trump Administration antitrust enforcement is enabling media consolidation, raising costs for consumers, and harming competition in broadcasting markets.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust
“Examining the Sports Broadcasting Act”
June 10, 2026
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
I don’t disagree with my Republican colleagues that the basic framework of the Sports Broadcasting Act might be worth revisiting, given how much has changed since it was enacted 65 years ago.
When I was growing up, and for much of the life of the Sports Broadcasting Act, there were only three networks on the national airwaves, and all you needed to watch your favorite team play on Sunday was a television and an antenna. Today, an NFL fan must spend between five hundred and a thousand dollars, every single season, in subscriptions to various platforms and streaming subscriptions, just to cheer on their home team during the season.
It seems fundamentally unfair that the leagues should get billion-dollar deals, the networks should get billion-dollar contracts, but the fans should be left out in the cold. That hardly captures the spirit of the antitrust exemption that Congress passed in 1961.
What I have trouble computing, however, is why the majority has focused on this narrow issue against the backdrop of the most sweeping and aggressive media consolidation in American history.
Time and again, this Administration has allowed giant media companies to merge, leaving consumers with fewer choices, higher prices and less power. They waved through Disney’s acquisition of Fubo and ESPN’s acquisition of NFL Network, resulting in greater consolidation and dramatically reduced competition in the sports rights market. They turned a blind eye to the Nexstar-Tegna merger, which would give one company broadcast reach into 80% of households in the United States and thereby lead to increased blackouts for sports fans and higher prices for all consumers. And now the Paramount-Skydance/Warner Bros.-Discovery merger, which President Trump personally muscled through after breaking up a deal between Netflix and Warner Bros., is sailing through Trump’s politicized Executive Branch review process.
Last month, Ranking Member Pallone and I wrote to Paramount-Skydance's CEO David Ellison about this pending merger. We pointed out that less than a year after Trump blessed Ellison’s takeover of Paramount Global, which includes the Paramount Pictures, CBS, BET, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and streaming services Paramount+ and Pluto, he is now arranging for David Ellison to add Warner Bros. Studios, DC Entertainment, HBO, CNN, the Discovery Channel, HGTV, Cartoon Network, TBS, and TNT, as well as HBO and Discovery’s streaming services to his awesome media conglomerate.
If this deal goes through, the Ellisons, one family of active Trump mega-donors and enablers will have managed to purchase an unparalleled sports and news empire in just one year. That means the same kind of unprecedented pro-MAGA editorial control we have seen at CBS News and 60 Minutes, including the appointment of a full-time paid MAGA Minder, a government spy and censor in the newsroom could occur at CNN. That means American consumers, who already pay an average $69 a month for streaming on top of $100 a month for cable and $78 for internet, paying even more for sports, news, and entertainment.
So, in the face of this profound consolidation and antitrust crisis sweeping the media market, why is our majority focused on the NFL alone? Why is the Trump Administration, through the DOJ and the FCC, investigating the NFL but not other parties, in the market that threaten far worse harm to consumers and society?
Well, it turns out that, early in this Administration, according to a Wall Street Journal report, FOX Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch personally lobbied President Trump at a White House dinner to crack down on the NFL’s streaming deals—streaming deals that compete directly with Fox’s broadcast business. And the DOJ’s investigation, like this hearing, appears to be all about helping Mr. Murdoch get a better broadcast deal for FOX. That hardly seems like a methodical or principled way to proceed.
The majority has offered no legislation to reform the Sports Broadcasting Act. They have called no hearings on the Ellisons’ corrupt Paramount-Skydance/Warner Bros. Discovery merger or the deep corruption at the heart of the Paramount-Skydance merger. They have not called a single Trump Administration antitrust official to come testify before this subcommittee about the political destabilization and saturation of the antitrust process in the Trump Administration.
In fact, the only Trump era antitrust official to appear before us this entire Congress was a Democratic witness, Roger Alford—who was fired by the Trump Administration for refusing to participate in the pay-to-play corruption of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Divisions. Despite being a political appointee, including serving as the #2 at DOJ’s Antitrust Division in the second Trump Administration, he was so appalled by what he saw that he bravely decided to blow the whistle on how this Administration is every day selling out American consumers to corporate mega-donors and their White House-connected lobbyists.
This selective interest suggests that the Republican majority has little interest in conducting real oversight here or promoting real competition. They are doing nothing toprotect American consumers, American workers, and American innovation. Instead, they are siding time and again with big corporations striving for monopoly profits that jack up prices and depress wages while offering worse goods and services.
Commissioner Gomez, I think we are watching the alarming consequences for the First Amendment. Emboldened by its efforts to capture CBS and CNN, the Trump Administration has now turned its attention to ABC and its parent company, Disney, which, you warned, are facing a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” from the Trump Administration.