Business Updates: Discovery-WarnerMedia Merger Clears Antitrust Scrutiny

Discovery and AT&T cleared a significant regulatory hurdle on Wednesday that put the two companies on a glide path to close a deal to combine Discovery and WarnerMedia in the next two or three months.

The merger “satisfied the closing condition” as part of an antitrust review by the Department of Justice, Discovery said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

When closed, the deal will create one of the biggest media companies in the country, combining the assets of HBO, Warner Bros. television and film studios and the sports-heavy TNT and TBS networks with Discovery’s enormous library of nonfiction programming, which includes Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, HGTV, the Food Network and Animal Planet.

The announcement on Wednesday also means that Discovery and WarnerMedia executives should be able to more deeply engage with one another and conduct more intimate business reviews, which they could not do before clearing the regulatory review.

With the antitrust clearance, AT&T will not face the same level of government scrutiny it had received when it purchased Time Warner in October 2016. That deal was fiercely contested by the Justice Department and in limbo for 20 months before finally closing in June 2018.

Union membership nationwide has tumbled to its lowest in decades, but recent events suggest that the unionization movement in the United States seems to be gaining momentum.

It certainly has support from the Biden administration, which issued a report this week outlining dozens of steps it would take to promote union membership. The DealBook newsletter has rounded up some recent union developments making news:

• Congressional staff members started a unionization effort last week, noting that they are employed by politicians who say they support the labor movement. Before their workers can unionize, however, House members must pass a resolution allowing it. Representative Andy Levin, Democrat of Michigan, plans to do that this week. President Biden supports the union drive, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Tuesday.

• Starbucks workers in California this week joined their counterparts in more than 50 locations in 19 states, pushing for union elections after the first company-owned store unionized in Buffalo, N.Y., at the end of last year. On Tuesday, the company fired several employees in Memphis who were seeking to unionize their store, for what the company said were violations of safety and security policies.

• Amazon faces another union vote at a warehouse in Alabama, after the National Labor Relations Board threw out the results, citing misconduct by the company. A rerun of the vote started last week, and workers at a Staten Island warehouse also recently collected enough signatures to warrant a vote.

General Motors and Ford Motor said on Tuesday that they had not experienced any disruptions to parts deliveries at their factories because of the protests over vaccine mandates in Canada and that they did not expect any immediate problems.

The protests have partially closed the bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, a busy border crossing that is a vital link for the movement of automotive components to plants in both countries.

About 8,000 trucks cross the Ambassador Bridge linking the two cities on a typical day, many of them hauling auto parts from suppliers on one side to vehicle plants on the other. Traffic over the bridge was closed Monday night by a protest of truckers that has clogged the streets of Ottawa for the past week. In the last few days, the protest, which began as a demonstration against requirements that truck drivers crossing the U.S.-Canada border be vaccinated, has spread to other parts of Canada.

The protests have raised fears that the auto industry, a major employer across the Midwest and Ontario, could grind to a halt if the free flow of parts and vehicles across the border is halted or disrupted.

G.M. and Ford have extensive operations in Canada. G.M. has a large assembly plant in Oshawa, near Toronto, that it recently retooled. The company said in November that the plant had reopened and produced its first Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. The automaker is planning to build electric delivery vans at another plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, roughly halfway between Detroit and Toronto. Ford has two auto assembly and two engine plants in Ontario.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it had seized more than $3.6 billion worth of stolen Bitcoin and arrested a married couple, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, accused of laundering the cryptocurrency.

Here’s what you need to know:

“Cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals.”

It was the department’s largest financial seizure ever. About 119,754 Bitcoin was stolen in 2016 from the Bitfinex exchange, according to prosecutors. (It was worth $71 million at the time of the theft and is now valued at over $4.5 billion.) Law enforcement officials recovered 94,636 Bitcoin, valued at more than $3.6 billion, from a wallet belonging to Mr. Lichtenstein.

“In a futile effort to maintain digital anonymity, the defendants laundered stolen funds through a labyrinth of cryptocurrency transactions,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. READ THE FULL ARTICLE →

James Bennet, the former editorial page editor for The New York Times, is expected to continue testifying on Wednesday in the trial that will determine whether The Times is held liable for defamation in the United States for the first time in at least 50 years.

The Times is being sued by Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, whose legal team tried for most of the day on Tuesday to convince the jury that Mr. Bennet and other Times journalists acted hastily and recklessly in publishing an editorial that falsely linked Ms. Palin’s political rhetoric to a mass shooting.

They are also trying to establish that The Times was slow in appending a correction, which did not name her or offer an apology to Ms. Palin.

They focused on emails between Mr. Bennet and other members of the Times opinion staff to establish a timeline between the publication of the editorial on the night of June 14, 2017, and the addition of the correction the next morning.

The editorial, which lamented the nation’s increasingly heated political discourse, was written after the shooting at a congressional baseball team practice in June 2017 that left Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, gravely wounded. As Mr. Bennet was editing the piece before publication, he inserted an incorrect reference to a 2010 map from Ms. Palin’s political action committee that included illustrations of cross hairs over 20 House districts held by Democrats.

That addition — “the link to political incitement was clear” — asserted that there was a link between the map and the 2011 shooting that critically injured another member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords, and killed six others in Tucson, Ariz. In fact, such a link was never established.

The willingness of people to pay for digital access is giving many publishers hope that they have found a way to survive — and, according to the most optimistic, even thrive.

Publishers have thought for many years that online subscriptions might be the best path back to a level of regular revenue that could support continued investment in their newsrooms. But it has been elusive, Marc Tracy reports for The New York Times.

Many newspapers that first found success emphasizing online subscriptions had national reaches, including The Wall Street Journal (which has had a paywall since 1997) and The New York Times (since 2011).

National or global appeal is not realistic for most local newspapers, which stand to sacrifice loyal readers if they cease covering their core geographic areas intensely. The most ambitious speak of dominating their states.

But the past several years have revealed that by doing well in one’s backyard, one can support a staff large enough to cover it ambitiously:

Wall Street’s gains extended to a second day on Wednesday. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite each rose more than 1 percent.

Here are the highlights:

• Chipotle rose 7.8 percent after the company reported on Tuesday that its revenue increased 22 percent to $2 billion in the latest quarter compared with the same period the year before. The fast food chain also said that the higher costs of beef and transportation were passed on to consumers without dampening demand.

• CVS fell about 4 percent, even after the company reported stronger than expected earnings resulting from coronavirus testing and vaccinations. CVS cautioned, however, that demand for tests and shots will fall sharply this year.

• Lyft fell 1.5 percent after the ride hailing company reported it lost $1 billion last year, compared with $1.8 billion in 2020. The company also warned that the Omicron variant would affect its current quarter. It’s rival Uber will report earnings after the close of trading on Wednesday.

• The gains on Wall Street come a day before another key inflation update. The Consumer Price Index is expected to show that prices rose more than 7 percent in January. Inflation is already accelerating at its fastest pace since 1982, and the data will be scrutinized in case it affects the Federal Reserve’s plans to raise interest rates this year in an effort to cool the economy down.

• Stocks in Europe rose sharply. The Stoxx Europe 600 was up 1.8 percent on Wednesday.