This one's gonna make some waves.
Get ready for more of this:
This was a pretty old rule, though, and I'll let you read what NBC News had to say about this because they're definitely not the bad guys at all in any way, shape, or form.
In a 2-1 vote, the FCC repealed a 22-year-old rule holding that a company cannot own stations that reach more than a combined 39% of the U.S. television audience. The ownership limit will be replaced by a case-by-case approach.
Hello, Sinclair!
Excuse my cynicism. There is another side to this argument.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote in Breitbart last month,
For a long time, the cap worked. It operated to check the power of national programmers and helped ensure a healthy relationship between them and the owners of local TV stations ...
But the broadcast and broader media industry has transformed dramatically in recent years. And the cap no longer constrains the power of national programmers. Instead, it prevents local broadcasters from competing on a level playing field.
Carr goes into more detail:
This is because national programmers no longer rely in the same way on local broadcast TV stations to distribute their programming. Today, national programmers can distribute their programming to 100 percent of the country — either through their own streaming services or through deals they cut with nationwide 'virtual cable companies,' like YouTubeTV. The cap no longer constrains their control over distribution in this respect.
You can see his point. We're all already being brainwashed by the national programmers who have our full attention — might as well make it uniform across the board on a level playing field.
Here's the FCC's lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez:
Eliminating the cap does not free local broadcasters from economic pressure, it just changes who is doing the squeezing. 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.
As you might imagine, Gomez was the lone vote on the losing side of this decision.
Regardless of all of these arguments, it happened. The rule is scrapped.
And we will see how this plays out in court because it's likely headed there.
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