Nexstar Media Group announced Thursday that it has completed its $6.2 billion acquisition of rival television station company Tegna. But now eight state attorneys general are stepping up their legal battle to block the merger.
On Friday, eight states filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in California federal court, prohibiting Nexstar from “combining or commingling its operations with the assets it yesterday acquired from Tegna, Inc., a substantial competitor,” and forcing Nexstar to “keep the acquired Tegna assets separate pending further proceedings.”
The partnership will augment Nexstar, already the largest television station group in the U.S., with Tegna stations, resulting in a company with 259 full-power stations (after the sale of six stations), partnering with networks such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. The deal will allow the combined company to reach 80% of U.S. TV households. This violates the FCC’s ownership cap on a single company owning a station that reaches more than 39% of the United States, but the FCC granted an exemption from that rule. The Department of Justice also approved the Nexstar-Tegna transaction.
Late Wednesday, states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia) filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, alleging that the Nexstar-Tegna merger violates antitrust laws. The attorneys general in all eight states are Democrats.
According to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office, which led the multi-state lawsuit, merging the operations of the No. 1 and No. 3 television stations would “put more broadcast programming into fewer hands, reduce local jobs, increase cable costs, and significantly impact the delivery of news and other media content to Americans across the country.” “Alarmingly, reports have already detailed Nexstar’s firing of longtime journalists in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.”
“The federal government has a duty to protect our economy, our consumers’ wallets, and the competitive markets in which our businesses and workers can thrive,” Bonta said in a statement Friday. “By approving the disastrous broadcast merger of Nexstar and Tegna, the Trump administration has once again put corporate interests ahead of the interests of ordinary Americans — on our watch. Today, I join a coalition of attorneys general in asking the courts to halt this merger. This merger is illegal, plain and simple, and violates federal antitrust laws that protect consumers. ”
Representatives for Nexstar and Tegna did not respond to requests for comment.
Separately, DirecTV sued Nexstar and Tegna in the same court on March 18, also seeking to block the deal. DirecTV said the combination of Nexstar and Tegna “will irreversibly increase consumer costs, reduce local competition, close local newsrooms, and increase the frequency and duration of blackouts for major local teams and network programming.” DirecTV announced Friday that it would proceed with the lawsuit.
“A temporary restraining order is necessary to avoid irreparable harm to the public interest and the ability of plaintiff states to effectively enforce their domestic antitrust laws,” the states said in Friday’s motion.
At the time the eight states filed their lawsuit, Nexstar and Tegna “had not yet received the necessary federal regulatory approvals to complete the transaction.”
Minutes after filing the lawsuit, the states said, they sent a copy of the complaint to Nexstar and Tegna’s attorneys, “requiring the defendants to enter into a stipulated timing agreement in which Nexstar and Tegna agree not to complete the challenged transaction until a final judgment is entered in this case.”
However, “defendants failed to even grant plaintiff’s request,” the state’s complaint states. “Instead, late in the afternoon yesterday, March 19, Nexstar completed its acquisition of Tegna, shortly after regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) and the announcement of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (“U.S. Department of Justice”) decision to prematurely end its investigation into the transaction. ”
Nexstar and Tegna’s decision to close the deal “despite multiple pending lawsuits, their unresponsiveness to the attorney’s investigation, and their rush to complete the transaction raise alarming concerns that the defendants may seek to push through this transaction to thwart effective judicial review.”
The state’s lawsuit alleges that a merger between Nexstar and Tegna would create “a broadcast giant that would control an unprecedented share of broadcast television content, including local news and sports from the nation’s most-watched ‘Big Four’ stations (Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS).” Such organizations would also have “greater authority to raise prices for cable, satellite, and fiber-optic television consumers and to control or degrade the quality and variety of broadcast television content.”
A copy of the Legislature’s motion for a temporary restraining order can be found at this link.
In November 2025, President Donald Trump said he would oppose the FCC’s move to raise or eliminate the 39% cap on local TV station owners if the result would be the “expansion of fake news networks,” specifically citing ABC News and NBC News.
But since then, Trump has publicly expressed support for the Nexstar-Tegna merger. On February 7, 2026, President Trump said in a social media post, “Get the deal done!” and said the Nexstar and Tegna merger should be allowed to “remove fake news” from the “fake news national television network.” Shortly after, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr also endorsed the Nexstar-Tegna deal on social media, writing, “Let’s end it.”
When the FCC announced Thursday that it had approved the Nexstar-Tegna merger, Carr said it would further the agency’s goal of “enabling broadcast television stations to serve their communities, consistent with public interest obligations.” He also argued that the FCC’s decision to approve the deal “will ensure these stations have the resources to continue investing in their local news businesses.”
