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from the too-big-to-care-about-the-customer dept.
AT&T is expected to announce on Saturday evening that it will purchase Time Warner Inc. for over $80 billion:
AT&T Inc. has reached an agreement to buy Time Warner Inc. for $86 billion, according to a person familiar with the plans, in a deal that would transform the phone company into a media giant. The wireless carrier agreed to pay $107.50 a share, the person said. The deal is half cash and half stock, according to people familiar with the transaction.
[...] For Time Warner, the deal represents a victory for [Chief Executive Mr. Jeff Bewkes], 64, who took some heat from investors for rebuffing a takeover bid two years ago from 21st Century Fox at $85 a share. [...] A merger of the companies would be the most ambitious marriage of content and distribution in the media and telecom industries since Comcast Corp.'s purchase of NBCUniversal and would create a behemoth to rival that cable giant. A rigorous regulatory review is expected and the acquisition of Time Warner likely wouldn't close until late 2017, people close to the process said.
Donald Trump has said that he would block the proposed merger and other media company mergers.
Also at Washington Post, NYT, CNN, and Reuters.
Update: Confirmed by AT&T.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @07:20AM
And that's how you enable political corruption.
When you chose to treat them as if they are all equally venal, then there is no incentive for them to do anything but live down to the worst expectations.
Recognizing reality doesn't necessarily enable corruption, but voting for the 'lesser evil' certainly does. Also, merely acknowledging the indisputable fact that a grand, grand, grand, grand majority of politicians are lying scumbags is not the same as saying they all lie the same amount. There is a reason that people have low opinions of politicians; that profession attracts sociopaths, psychopaths, and other scum.
By abdicating an expectation of good governance
I don't have an expectation of good governance, and anyone who does it a blind moron. I hope to have a good government and work towards that goal, but I don't really expect any such thing to happen.
your attitude is the single greatest enabler of corruption in a democratic system of government.
One-person-one-vote is not democratic; it encourages people to vote for the 'lesser evil', which makes change very difficult. It's not democratic to force third parties to waste a significant portion of their already limited resources going through various procedures to get on the ballots in 50 individual states. It's not democratic to hinder third parties' ballot access by finding utterly preposterous reasons to reject the work they did to get on the ballot. Winner-take-all systems aren't democratic either. The US is barely democratic at all, and the mere fact that some countries are even worse does not make the US good. Our two-party system is a huge enabler of corruption, and it is very difficult to motivate the average person enough to stand against it; most people don't vote, and the ones who do vote tend to foolishly vote for a 'lesser evil' as if that's going to end our two-party system.