Emily Steel

Apparently, the Justice Department has called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell Turner Broadcasting, the group of cable channels that includes CNN, as a potential requirement for approving the companies’ pending $85.4 billion deal. The other possible way for the merger to win approval would be for AT&T to sell its DirecTV division, apparently.

President Trump has long had ties to the nation’s major media players. But his connections with the country’s largest tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., run deeper than most. A former top executive of Trump’s casino business sits on AMI’s four-member board of directors, and an adviser joined the media company after the election. The company’s chairman, David J. Pecker, is a close friend of the president’s.

Bill O’Reilly has been forced out of his position as a prime-time host on Fox News, the company said on April 19, after the disclosure of multiple settlements involving sexual harassment allegations against him. His ouster brings an abrupt and embarrassing end to his two-decade reign as one of the most popular and influential commentators in television. “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel,” 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, said in a statement.

O’Reilly’s departure comes two and a half weeks after an investigation by The New York Times revealed how Fox News and 21st Century Fox had repeatedly stood by O’Reilly even as sexual harassment allegations piled up against him. The Times found that the company and O’Reilly reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million. Since then, more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show, and women’s rights groups called for his ouster. Inside the company, women expressed outrage and questioned whether top executives were serious about maintaining a culture based on “trust and respect,” as they had promised last summer when another sexual harassment scandal forced the ouster of Fox News’s chairman, Roger Ailes.

Nearly nine months after Roger Ailes was ousted from his position as chairman of Fox News Channel, another woman has come forward with allegations of sexual harassment against him and the network. On April 3, Julie Roginsky, a current Fox News contributor, filed a 17-page suit in New York State Supreme Court against Ailes, Fox News and Bill Shine, the network’s co-president, asserting that she faced retaliation for rebuffing Ailes’s sexual advances and for refusing to disparage Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued Ailes summer 2016.

The new suit adds to Fox News’s woes at a time when it is trying to move past the sexual harassment crisis that engulfed the network in 2016. The network recently reached a settlement valued at more than $2.5 million, according to people briefed on the agreement, with a former contributor named Tamara Holder, who said she was sexually assaulted by a senior manager in his office. Also, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan is looking into how Fox News structures its settlements, an inquiry disclosed in a court hearing in February by the lawyer for a former Fox employee suing the company.

Summer 2016, as it wrapped up multiple settlements after the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal, Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, were trying hard to end the ugliest chapter in its 20-year history. The downfall of Ailes, the former chairman and chief executive, had exposed a newsroom culture that many women there called hostile and demeaning. 21st Century Fox ordered an internal investigation and stated publicly that “behavior that disrespects women” would not be tolerated.

Nearly eight months later, the company finds itself still dealing with fallout from that crisis. In late February, 21st Century Fox reached a settlement worth more than $2.5 million with a former Fox News contributor who reported that she was sexually assaulted by an executive at company headquarters two years ago.

In the weeks after Roger Ailes was ousted as the chairman of Fox News in July, amid a sexual harassment scandal, company executives secretly struck an agreement with a longtime on-air personality who had come forward with similar accusations about the network’s top host, Bill O’Reilly. The employee, Juliet Huddy, had said that O’Reilly pursued a sexual relationship with her in 2011, at a time he exerted significant influence over her career. When she rebuffed his advances, he tried to derail her career, according to a draft of a letter from her lawyers. The letter includes allegations that O’Reilly had called Huddy repeatedly and that it sometimes sounded like he was masturbating. He invited her to his house on Long Island, tried to kiss her, took her to dinner and the theater, and after asking her to return a key to his hotel room, appeared at the door in his boxer shorts, according to the letter. In exchange for her silence and agreement not to sue, she was paid a sum in the high six figures, apparently. The agreement was between Huddy and 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News. The company and O’Reilly’s lawyer said her allegations were false.

Comcast is the country’s largest cable company, selling television, broadband and phone service to 28.3 million customers. AT&T is the country’s largest television distributor after its acquisition last year of DirecTV, and counts more than 100 million subscribers across its wireless, broadband and TV offerings. Consumer groups denounced both deals with similar complaints: that they stifle competition, create unfair pricing and spur even more consolidation in an industry already controlled by relatively few companies. And some Washington experts have pointed to the conditions placed on Comcast’s deal for NBCUniversal as being too difficult to enforce — a harbinger, they say, of similar problems with an AT&T-Time Warner merger. Comcast says there has been just one violation of the conditions attached to its deal, but critics point to several disputes. They also point out that the conditions expire in 2018.

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, made a big bet in the summer of 2014 when he rejected an $80 billion takeover bid by 21st Century Fox, controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Bewkes had promised shareholders that Time Warner would create more value on its own than any proposal Fox was positioned to offer. Privately, Bewkes was telling colleagues and investors that Time Warner was likely to land a much more lucrative deal if it were put on the market a couple of years later. Among the potential bidders, Time Warner reasoned, were deep-pocketed technology companies like Apple and Google — and even, possibly, AT&T, which was tied up with a different deal at the time.

Over the next two years, it was not clear that Bewkes had played his cards right. Fears of cord-cutting, ratings declines and a weak advertising market stoked panic across the industry over the future of traditional media in a digital world. And while Time Warner introduced several efforts to transform the company, such as a stand-alone streaming service for HBO, questions persisted about whether the company would have the resources to compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon. As it turns out, Bewkes’s bet paid off. In a big way. On Oct 22, AT&T announced that it had agreed to buy Time Warner for about $85.4 billion, or $107.50 a share in cash and stock — about a 35 percent premium to where Time Warner’s stock was trading before reports of the merger talks, and well above the $85 a share Fox was offering. For Bewkes, the deal has sealed his legacy as a behind-the-scenes non-mogul media mogul.

Roger Ailes stepped down July 21 as chairman and chief executive of Fox News, ending a 20-year reign as head of the cable network he built into a ratings juggernaut and an influential platform for Republican politics. Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media mogul who started Fox News with Ailes, will assume the role of chairman and will be an interim chief executive of Fox News channel and Fox Business Network until a permanent replacement for Ailes is found.

Ailes will receive about $40 million as part of a settlement agreement, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. As part of the agreement, Ailes cannot start a competitor to Fox News. He will continue to make himself available as an adviser to Murdoch on an interim basis, the person said, though he will not be directly involved with Fox News or its owner, 21st Century Fox. In a statement, Murdoch praised Ailes, 76, and his “remarkable contribution” to the company, without making mention of the sexual harassment scandal that felled him.

Comcast reported net income of almost $2 billion in the second quarter, with revenue growth in the company’s cable business offsetting a lackluster performance in its NBCUniversal entertainment group.

Revenue in Comcast’s cable unit increased 5.4 percent, to $11 billion. Comcast added 203,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter.