The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to end a regulation that capped ownership of local TV stations.
In a 2-1 vote, the FCC removed the ownership cap, which prohibited ownership of local stations that reached more than 39 percent of TV homes in the United States. Removing the ownership cap has been a priority for FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who has argued the rule created an unbalanced relationship between national networks and station owners and that its removal will spur investment in local news.
Big station owners like Sinclair and Nexstar have lobbied for removal of the ownership cap. Nexstar closed a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna earlier this year that would give the combined company a reach to about 80 percent of the country, though it’s on hold due to an antitrust lawsuit brought by DirecTV and several states.
“Repealing the national cap will provide essential relief for local broadcasters by restoring a healthy counterbalance to the growing leverage of national programmers,” Carr said in prepared remarks at Thursday’s FCC meeting. “Increased scale will enable broadcasters to attract the capital and advertising revenue needed to sustain and produce trusted and community-focused news and programming. We should learn from our mistakes with the local newspaper industry, and we should not let the same thing happen to the local broadcast TV industry. Trusted sources of local reporting, broadcast over the public airwaves, are worth protecting and worth fighting for.”
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, cast the dissenting vote (the FCC currently only has three commissioners, short of the five its charter stipulates). “The large station groups positioned to grow even larger under this decision are not local broadcasters, they are national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them,” Gomez said. “Trading a squeeze from Big Tech for a squeeze from Big Media does nothing to protect the communities this cap was designed to serve.”
The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group representing station owners, applauded the vote. “The FCC’s decision to eliminate the outdated national television ownership cap marks a generational step toward strengthening local stations and ensuring they can compete in today’s media marketplace,” the group said in a statement.
Carr has said that in lieu of the cap, the FCC will review station ownership case by case. That could include efforts by broadcast networks to increase their station footprints as well: Disney (which owns ABC), Fox and Paramount (which owns CBS) all joined a filing to the FCC last year — along with the NAB, Nexstar, Sinclair and Scripps — in support of the cap.
Fox also sent a separate letter to the commission arguing that networks’ owned and operated stations should be treated the same as those owned by other companies. “Network owned or affiliated stations are not merely similarly situated to other stations in this context, they are identically situated, facing the same competitive pressures from the same roster of Big Tech competitors,” the Fox letter read. “Likewise, singling out affiliates of the ‘big four’ networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) for different treatment from affiliates of other networks (e.g., CW, Univision, ION Television), also would require drawing arbitrary distinctions with no rational relationship to the National Cap.”
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