Why Rupert Murdoch is asking Donald Trump for help fighting the NFL

Rupert Murdoch reportedly lobbied Donald Trump in February to slow the NFL's move to sell more games to streamers like Amazon and Netflix, as Fox depends heavily on NFL broadcasts for viewers. The article says the FCC, Senate, and DOJ have since intensified scrutiny of the league's media deals, though causality is not proven. The story also underscores the transactional overlap between Murdoch and Trump, including Trump's then-pending lawsuit against Murdoch, News Corp., and the WSJ.

Analysis

This is less about near-term programming economics than about bargaining power into the next NFL rights cycle. If regulators lean even modestly against further migration to streaming, the league’s ability to force a richer take-rate from Amazon/Netflix is capped, which indirectly helps incumbent broadcasters preserve scarcity value; if not, FOX’s flagship sports asset risks a structural margin squeeze as cost inflation outruns ad-load growth. The second-order effect is that the market may be underpricing how much political/regulatory noise can delay, rather than derail, media-rights inflation — a delay that matters because sports rights repricing is a step-function event, not a smooth series of quarterly tweaks.

For FOXA, the risk is asymmetry: downside comes sooner than upside. A more hostile regulatory posture could restrain future rights inflation over the next 6-18 months, but any relief is likely to be incremental because the NFL still maximizes monetization across all distribution channels. That means FOX may win time, not economics; if management over-commits to defending sports at any price, equity returns get trapped between fixed content costs and a mature linear bundle.

NFLX and AMZN are the cleaner beneficiaries on a 12-24 month horizon if the political pressure fizzles: both have the balance sheet and global ad/subscription flywheel to absorb incremental sports inventory, while broadcasters do not. The contrarian angle is that the market may overestimate regulatory permanence — this is a negotiation tool as much as a policy regime, so any headline de-escalation could re-rate streaming rights winners quickly. The best setup is not to bet on a binary legal outcome, but on the option value of continued streaming expansion versus a temporary pause that lets rights inflation reset higher later.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Short FOXA vs long NFLX on a 3-6 month horizon: position for regulatory noise to pressure FOXA’s negotiating leverage while NFLX retains the best ability to monetize incremental sports hours; target 1.5-2.0x upside on the pair if streaming deals continue to broaden.
• Buy AMZN on pullbacks only, with a 6-12 month view: incremental sports inventory is a small earnings bridge but a meaningful engagement lever; risk/reward favors owning the platform that can subsidize rights costs across commerce, ads, and Prime retention.
• Consider FOXA put spreads 9-12 months out as a cheap hedge against rights-cost escalation into the next negotiation cycle; this is a convex way to express margin compression risk without paying for a full outright short.
• For event-driven traders, fade any sharp selloff in NFLX/AMZN on new DOJ/FCC headlines unless there is a formal legal action; these headlines are more likely to slow deal timing than to impair multi-year economics.