Brendan Carr Is Illegally Dismantling U.S. Media Consolidation Law

from the laws-are-just-suggestions dept

Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what’s left of the country’s already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what’s left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president’s ass.

Current laws (remember those?) prohibit any single local broadcast news company from serving more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The original (good) idea was that this helped protect opinion diversity and competition in the local broadcast news space. Republicans don’t like that, because they want to replace all journalism with right-wing and oligarch friendly propaganda.

Brendan Carr last March had already made it clear he viewed the law as optional when he granted Nexstar Media Group a waiver for its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna. That deal would let the company reach more than half of all U.S. households with what passes as “local news.” Now he’s trying to replace a congressionally-approved law with a “case by case review” dictated by Republican whims:

“Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.”

This is, to be clear, illegal. Something the FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, made clear in her own statement:

“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.”

Clearly there will be lawsuits, though they’re likely to drag on until long after Nexstar and Tegna have merged, with future regulators being very unlikely to unwind the transaction. I’d then expect to see Sinclair Broadcasting to merge with the remaining company, creating a monopoly over local broadcast TV.

While people are quick to insist that “who cares, nobody watches this stuff,” they don’t seem to realize that somewhere around 80 million households still watch local broadcast TV channels via antenna, cable TV, streaming providers, or satellite.

As I’ve frequently discussed, most of these local broadcasters deliver a sloppy combination of lazy infotainment and right-wing agitprop, as that viral video about Sinclair Broadcasting made clear a few years back:

Carr’s very unsubtle goal here is to turn the entirety of U.S. local broadcast television into propaganda arms of the U.S. right wing. That’s not an opinion or hyperbole, and he’s well on his way already. It might help if there was a functional opposition party that had made meaningful media reforms a centerpiece of their political platform anytime in the last quarter century.

And this is, of course, just local broadcast TV. We’ve also got Carr’s FCC helping Larry Ellison do the same thing to CBS and CNN. Ellison’s also steadily doing the same thing to TikTok while Elon Musk does the same thing to what used to be Twitter. If you stand back, tilt you head, and squint just right, you might begin to notice a consistent theme.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadcast tv, corruption, disinformation, fcc, journalism, local news, media consolidation, propaganda, republican