Recode Daily: Trump’s meddling may be behind the roadblocks to the AT&T/Time Warner megamerger

President Trump’s Department of Justice is threatening to scuttle AT&T’s proposed purchase of Time Warner unless the merged companies dump Turner Broadcasting and CNN — a news organization the president hates more than most. AT&T’s CFO now says he doesn’t have a timetable for the $85.4 billion deal. Normally, some Democrats would be celebrating the merger’s obstruction, but the Justice Department’s efforts are shrouded in controversy because of fears that Trump might be meddling. [Peter Kafka / Recode]

Roku delivered its first earnings report as a public company, and shares popped more than 20 percent after the company posted better-than-expected sales and a narrower loss than Wall Street estimated. And quarterly revenue at 21st Century Fox slightly beat expectations; the company has considered selling most of its assets to Disney, which reports today.

After reporting a third straight quarter of bad earnings, Snap is scaring off some investors. Shares were down 15 percent at the end of trading Wednesday. But it had some buyers, too: Chinese investment company Tencent Holdings, which owns the WeChat messaging app, has taken a 12 percent stake in the company. And it looks like the redesigned Snapchat app that CEO Evan Spiegel hinted at on Tuesday will debut on Dec. 4. [Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Democratic Sen. Al Franken scorched Amazon, Facebook and Google in a speech, slamming the tech giants for using “sophisticated, strategic tool[s] to maintain and strengthen their own power.” And after refusing several times to appear before Congress, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer testified yesterday about a 2013 security exploit that compromised three billion user accounts, the single largest breach in history. [Tony Romm / Recode]

A year after Trump’s election, women and minority voters gave groundbreaking wins to a strikingly diverse field of Democrats. Among them: Danica Roem, a transgender woman who was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and who ran against a Republican incumbent who had introduced a “bathroom bill” in the Virginia Legislature to bar transgender people from restrooms. [The New York Times]

Big issues about ... big issues from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: The tech-themed issue of the Times Sunday Magazine takes on life after driving and the death of car culture. And the WSJ magazine devotes a special issue to nothing less than the future of everything, from a touring 3-D avatar of Whitney Houston to chatbots that will appeal your parking tickets and handle your divorce — for free. Don’t miss this NYT piece about AI researchers who left Elon Musk’s lab for a startup aimed at making robots that make other robots.

Top stories from Recode

Apple is making a new TV show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.

“Friends” stars, reunited! In 2019, probably.

Uber hasn’t recovered its business in San Francisco and New York since #deleteUber.

The company’s sales have gone back up to pre-#deleteUber levels in many of its other major markets.

It’s not just a Trump problem — we all have to take responsibility for Twitter.

Some 12 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms have had a positive impact on political discourse, while 63 percent believe it has been negative.

This is how tech can help us all survive a modern-day apocalypse.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has some ideas about how the industry can affect global health crises, climate change, extremism and poverty.

Comedian Dana Gould explains how to make TV in 2017, when “all programs are niche programs.”

On the latest episode of Recode Media, Gould talks about his horror-comedy show on IFC, "Stan Against Evil," which just started its second season.

This is cool

Here’s how and where to hide your bitcoin and blockchain fortune.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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