Brendan Carr’s FCC will begin the process of removing ownership limits by first targeting the current 39% population limit on television station ownership.
An August 6 vote will seek to replace the national cap with a case-by-case review, which Carr’s office says will “empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard. This action will foster a competitive media market, enhance localism, and promote investment in trusted sources of news and information.” No change on radio ownership is yet proposed.
The commission states, “Shifting from a relatively inflexible, ex ante regulation to an individualized, case-by-case assessment will help ensure that the Commission carries out its statutory mandates in an appropriate manner without having to show special circumstances that would justify a waiver of a rule that no longer serves the public interest.”
In an op-ed in Breitbart announcing the change Carr claims that distrust in mass media as a reasoning for the need to change writing, “All the way up through the 1990s, the majority of Americans trusted the media. When they turned on their TV, they felt like they were watching balanced programming that reflected their values. Reporters and journalists that lived in the same communities as their viewers anchored daily and nightly news shows at the local TV station. They reported facts and won awards for their gumshoe reporting. The media was respected.”
Yet what he is seeking to do goes against the opposite of what caused the claimed distrust as he harkens back to a point before any deregulation. He wants local broadcasters, but he also wants national ownership writing, “But the 39 percent cap continues to apply uniquely to the owners of local broadcast TV stations—forcing the market out of balance. Today, the cap is not protecting local broadcasters, it is preventing them from gaining the same scale that their competitors are free to enjoy. In other words, the national cap is now doing the exact opposite of what the FCC intended.” How does national scale help localization?
The FCC also claims in its announcement that “Under a case-by-case approach, the Commission’s interests in localism, viewpoint diversity, and competition (to the extent they are implicated in a case) can be fully analyzed and vindicated in the context of a specific transaction. There may be transactions that would have exceeded the limits of the 39% national cap that do not promote the public interest and those will be denied. On the other hand, there may be transactions that would have exceeded the cap that do promote the public interest and could gain Commission approval.”
INSTANT INSIGHT: This states they will weaponize the FCC to use their current judgements on “localism” and “viewpoint diversity” to choose buyers friendly to their causes. In a nation with a free press, no member of the government should have any say in selecting ownership on their viewpoints. As Carr has already used his position to go after the Walt Disney Company’s licenses this something we should all be against regardless of personal political belief is if you believe in the founding principals of the United States.
Update: Fellow FCC commissioner Anna Gomez released the following statement regarding the proposal:
This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder. Congress set the 39 percent national ownership cap in federal law, and only Congress has the authority to raise or eliminate it. The Commission cannot waive away that limit simply because these corporate behemoths want to get out from under it.
The 39 percent cap is not an FCC rule that the Commission can change on its own. Congress wrote that specific number into federal law in 2004, and it did so on purpose. When it acted, Congress also removed the cap from the routine review process it had previously established for the FCC to update its other media ownership rules, so the FCC is prohibited from revisiting the number the way it revisits rules it established independent of a congressional directive. Congress went further and told the FCC it could not simply decline to enforce the cap. It also required any company that goes over the limit to sell off stations within two years. Taken together, these provisions mean the 39 percent cap can only be changed by Congress, not by an FCC vote.
This is not the first time the FCC has tried to move on this issue. In 2003, the Commission raised the cap to 45 percent under its own authority. Congress stepped in within months, rewrote the law to set the cap at 39 percent, and made clear the FCC did not have the authority to change it. An FCC vote to raise the cap now would be unlawful, as it would mean doing the exact thing Congress has already said the Commission cannot do.
