Lacking in trust

Deserter Bowe Bergdahl may well have deserved prison time. Manhattan terrorist Sayfullo Saipov is a perfectly fine candidate for the death penalty. And the Justice Department may have very good reasons to be concerned about a merger between AT&T and TimeWarner.

But all of these decisions have now been swallowed, in perception if not reality, by the mouth that ate decent decision-making in the nation’s capital. You know his name.

Wednesday came reports that a marriage between one of the country’s telecom giants and one of its biggest content providers might face a court challenge from the feds’ anti-trust watchdogs.

To ease concerns about vertical integration that might stack the deck against competitors, the Department of Justice was said to have asked either for AT&T to sell off its DirecTV satellite provider, or for Time Warner to sell of Turner Broadcasting, which includes TBS, TNT and, drum roll, CNN.

Yep: That CNN, labeled by the President of the United States as a purveyor of “fake news,” an “enemy of the American people” and more.

Concerned citizens filled in the blanks as they can only be expected to, guessing that a cable channel a vindictive and illiberal President hates was getting punished for its reporting.

It’s a sane supposition, given that Trump has threatened punitive action against Amazon because of his beef with The Washington Post, owned by the Amazon founder. And menacingly suggested he might yank the license of NBC for airing what he calls “fake news.”

Not privy to the internal corporate documents that the antitrust division is using as the basis of its analysis, we will not here impugn the integrity of people who by all accounts are responsible professionals.

But we do know that their boss has made the job of antitrust — which depends upon the public trust — a hell of a lot harder.