By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, June 10 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. lawmaker on Wednesday said an investigation by the Justice Department into whether the National Football League has engaged in anticompetitive tactics in broadcast rights appears aimed at helping Fox Corp.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, at a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on sports broadcasting rights cited a report that Fox Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch personally lobbied President Donald Trump
at a White House dinner to crack down on the NFL streaming deals.
"The DOJ's investigation, like this hearing, appear to be all about helping Mr. Murdoch get a better broadcast deal for Fox," Raskin said.
Fox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The hearing on Wednesday addressed the growing shift of live sports to pay TV and subscription services away from broadcast networks.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, also suggested the hearing was called "because Rupert Murdoch personally lobbied the president at a White House dinner in February, warning that the NFL streaming deals would 'kill' broadcast networking."
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has also opened a review of the issue.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, cited reports that suggested "scrutiny now being applied to sports leagues through government agencies like the FCC and DOJ appears to be driven less by a genuine interest in protecting fans and more by the influence of powerful media companies with close ties to this administration that stand to benefit financially from the outcome."
The NFL, which declined to attend the hearing, said more than 87% of its games are aired on free broadcast TV and 100% of local market games are broadcast on local over-the-air TV. The league said the percentage of games aired on broadcast TV has varied little for two decades.
The NFL noted that 86 of the top 100 rated televised programs in 2025 were NFL games and said games are strategically picked weekly to put the most compelling game into each broadcast market.
The league said that Sunday Night Football on Comcast's NBC has been the No. 1 program in primetime for 15 years.
Major broadcast station owners including Fox and Sinclair said in March the FCC should address the trend of Big Tech companies acquiring the rights to sporting events, saying it could weaken local TV news.
The National Association of Broadcasters said global streaming giants like Amazon Prime, Alphabet, Apple, and Netflix can use live sports programming as a loss leader.
A 1961 law exempts major sports leagues from antitrust laws and allows them to pool their individual teams’ television rights and sell those rights as a package.
(Reporting by David Shepardson in WashingtonEditing by Bill Berkrot)
