FCC Protects What’s Left Of Media Ownership Limits After Trump Attacks

During Trump's tenure, his FCC took at absolute hatchet to what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot.

The Trump FCC stripped away a lot of the rules specifically so Sinclair Broadcasting, a GOP-propaganda effort posing as local news (recall the old Deadspin video?), could acquire Tribune Broadcasting for $3.9 billion. But ironically, Sinclair lied so frequently and repeatedly to regulators when selling the deal that even the dodgy, industry-friendly Trump FCC had to pull their support for appearances' sake.

Even with media consolidation rules in tatters, the broadcast industry hasn't been satisfied. They've been arguing for years that thanks to the success of streaming alternatives, there's simply no reason to have any media consolidation limits whatsoever. Giants like ABC, Fox, NBC, and CBS are all very keen to continue their often mindless and clearly harmful consolidation spree and merge with each other.

Enter the FCC, which has been tasked since 2018 to conduct a review of whether network and local TV station ownership limits are in the public interest. Media Professor Christopher Terry did a post for us last year discussing how the FCC had been kicking this can down the road for years after longstanding GOP efforts-and a Supreme Court ruling-gutted media ownership limits.

In a decision this week coming right in under the wire of a court-imposed deadline, the Biden FCC chose not to restore the limits stripped away by Trump.

That said, the FCC did refuse a broadcaster petition that would have considered streaming alternatives as local market competitors, allowing even greater consolidation. And they slightly tightened a few other aspects of what remains of the rules to prevent the big four" (ABC, Fox, CBS, NBC) from consolidating.

But all told, the overall arc of this effort has been away from media ownership restrictions and towards greater and greater consolidation (usually under the pretense that this is somehow innovative, or that having absolutely any sort of competent and functioning media regulators is unfairly burdensome):

To be clear, at this point only three core rules remain," FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said. No entity can own all the television stations in a single market, with a case-specific request necessary to own more than one of the top four stations. No entity can own all the radio stations in a single market. There is also a restriction on the national combination of two of the four big television networks - ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC."

While broadcast and cable TV is most certainly dying, this stuff still matters.

These are publicly-owned airwaves we're talking about, and we've watched as what once passed for local broadcast news has been replaced by gibberish, propaganda, and simulacrum at the hands of right-wing friendly companies like Sinclair, shoving independent media outlets, diversity ownership, and real local journalism out the back window as giant companies jockey to eat each other in an endless death spiral.

The goal: making money at scale with absolutely no consideration of the often obvious harms (fewer diversity owners of media companies, larger news deserts," less competition, more right wing propaganda posing as local news, endless layoffs, etc.). As far as multi-decade gambits dictated by amoral corporations and an increasingly corrupt legal system go, it's all worked quite successfully.

Though given the looming long-planned Supreme Court killing blow against the entirety of the regulatory state and anything even faintly passing as corporate accountability, and the general fecklessness of Democratic leadership in galvanizing any sort of coherent response, traditional media consolidation is probably going to be the least of our worries in the decades to come.