Time Warner boss goes for drama at trial

Uncle Sam is “ridiculous” if he thinks AT&T will employ its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner to use its newly gotten valuable programming as a cudgel against rivals, a federal judge in Washington was told on Wednesday.

That’s “not how it works,” said Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes as he took the witness stand.

The Justice Department has sued to stop the merger, and the 4-week- old trial is hitting its most dramatic point.

Bewkes will be followed on the stand by AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

The Time Warner boss said the argument in the regulator’s lawsuit “makes no sense.” AT&T will have to sell programming to other distributors in order to bring in ad revenue.

AT&T would lose a lot of money if Time Warner programming — from its HBO, Turner Sports, CNN and Warner Bros. studio — were not widely available, he said.

Bewkes said the merger is needed to better battle rivals like Netflix, Google, Facebook and Amazon as the entertainment sector experiences “tectonic changes.”

The Justice Department claims an AT&T-Time Warner combo would harm consumers by creating higher prices.

The government said the deal could cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars in jacked-up fees for cable TV and streaming video and permit Time Warner to push for blackouts in negotiations with payTV operators who wanted to show their content in order to allow AT&T subsidiary DirecTV to pick up more customers.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Bewkes told Judge Richard Leon in a crowded courtroom. “If our channels are not in distribution, we lose lots of money [from subscriptions and advertising].”