AT&T Inc. won’t sell CNN and never proposed such a deal, Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said as a battle escalated with antitrust officials over the $85.4 billion acquisition of the network’s owner, Time Warner Inc.
The unexpected fight is exploding over CNN, which has been a regular target of President Donald Trump’s Twitter attacks against what he calls “fake news.” The Justice Department’s Trump-appointed leadership is now taking a different view of the anti-competitive issues surrounding the deal than predecessors under Barack Obama did with similar agreements. Some lawmakers are calling the uproar over the cable news network political.
