No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.
Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.
I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.
Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
That's not the accusation at hand. The contention is that the Trump administration is threatening to block the merger (corruptly, in opposition to their republican proclivities) unless the news arm of the merged company is operated in a partisan way.
And the evidence for that is that Ellison walked in, threw out CBS News's pre-existing leadership, and brought in a reasonably-well-known-but-still-not-celebrity-enough-to-be-independent partisan republican voice to run it. And now that she's there, she's clearly operating the news room in a partisan way.
Seems like a pretty convincing theory to me.