Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr is moving to reform the agency’s media broadcast rules to boost local journalism and combat the influence of big tech, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
The FCC will issue a Notice of Public Rulemaking (NPRM) Wednesday night, which will announce that the agency intends to create, amend, or repeal a rule or regulation. In this case, the agency intends to reform regulations surrounding the media broadcast caps.
A person familiar with his thinking said Carr is open minded to changing the national ownership cap to the extent that doing so constrains the power of national programmers like NBC and curtails the power of big tech by introducing new competition for the advertising dollars that sustain big tech’s growth.
The source said the agency is looking at reforming the regulations to boost local journalism.
Chairman Carr has long said that, while there remains a distrust of national news outlets, most Americans trust their local journalists to provide news.
“If you look at the national news media, that’s where there’s a lot of lack of trust. But if you separate it to the level that’s actually regulated by the FCC — local broadcasters — people actually trust their local broadcasters,” the FCC chairman said at an event hosted by Semafor in February.
“They trust their local journalists. They see them at the post office, at the grocery store. So, one thing I’m trying to do is re-empower the local broadcasters to feel like they have the freedom to serve their local communities, because they have these relationships with the national programmers that I don’t think is entirely healthy. So, I want to re-empower those local broadcasters to serve the public interest.”
Carr, in a letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger last December, noted that local broadcast television stations are required by federal law to operate in the public interest and serve the needs of local communities.
Current FCC rules limit a single entity’s ability to own television stations that reach more than 39 percent of American television households. Another regulation bars the number of stations a company can own. Otherwise known as the “top 4” rule, it applies to ownership of ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC affiliate stations.
Similarly, there are stringent rules that limit the number of AM and FM radio stations that a company can own at one time.
Reforming media broadcast rules would also allow these networks to attract investment and give them a better hand in their relationship with networks.
“That’s resulted in all these stations that are under-invested,” Carr said. “On the radio side, you can go to a station in a small town and they’ll have a Dell laptop pumping music in from Chicago, because we don’t want someone to actually own the station that will invest in it,” Carr told News Nation in March.
For instance, in the December letter to Disney, Carr wrote that ABC has used concerning tactics during its negotiations its terms with affiliate stations, as part of what Carr believes is an outsized relationship between networks and local affiliates.
The FCC chairman wrote in his letter to Disney that ABC is “attempting to extract onerous financial and operational concessions from local broadcast TV stations under the threat of terminating long-held affiliations, which could result in blackouts and other harms to local consumers of broadcast news and content.
He added, “ABC is reportedly pulling the marquee programming, including local sports, from broadcast TV stations in favor of co-owned cable networks or those same subscription streaming services.”
Given these concerning tactics, Carr wrote that the relationship between networks such as ABC/Disney is out of balance with affiliate outlets:
Indeed, the Commission has long been concerned about the balance of power between networks and affiliates and has recently noted that the upward trend in reverse compensation is evidence of growing national network power over the local affiliates. Reported restrictions on negotiating carriage on streaming platforms and provisions that restrict a station’s ability to compete for local sports rights are further evidence of this growing imbalance. Not only does this raise localism concerns under the FCC’s statutory public interest standard, but it calls into question the extent to which some national programming networks are able to influence station operations and whether the various terms of network affiliation agreements could unduly inhibit the ability of local broadcast TV stations to make programming decisions that best reflect the needs and interests of their communities.[Emphasis added]
The potential rulemaking might also provide an opportunity to rebalance the relationship between big tech and broadcasters.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) led a coalition of 22 Senate Republicans urging the agency to reform the media broadcast rules, believing that it gives big tech too much power, as big tech has no limit to the number of users it can reach on the internet, while any entity is barred from owning television stations, which may reach more than 39 percent of American television households.
Moran told Breitbart News in early June that these broadcast rules have were written “before the internet,” to illustrate how antiquated these rules are.
The potential reforms could help local broadcasters compete against big tech for advertising, which is a main source of revenue for these local outlets.
“Fundamentally, advertising is what supports local journalism and big tech companies have been taking so many of those local ad dollars. So, the FCC needs to not sit idly by,” Carr said in March.
The National Association of Broadcasters, (NAB), the coalition of 22 Senate Republicans, 73 House Republicans have all backed the move.
Heritage Action for America, Citizens for Renewing America, and others wrote to Carr in mid-May:
Local broadcasters compete directly with Big Tech, streaming services, and social media platforms in the marketplace of consumer content. Yet, unlike their competitors such as YouTube and Facebook, broadcasters are limited by the ownership rules in how many households and consumers they can reach.
The conservative groups added, “We appreciate the leadership you’ve exhibited throughout your career on this important issue. We fully support your efforts to modernize the
FCC’s broadcast regulations, and we look forward to seeing the benefits to consumers, communities, and public safety as a result.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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