FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said at a Breitbart News policy event on Tuesday that the agency is working to “reinvigorate and empower” local broadcast television stations, noting how little trust there is in national media.
Carr discussed his plan to “reinvigorate and empower” local broadcast television stations in a sit-down interview with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle.
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 a company can own at one time.
The FCC chairman said over the years, the “balance of power” was leaned too much towards national programmers and local television networks have suffered as a result.
“There was actually a study that 15 percent of people would eat gas station sushi, but only 9 percent of people have trust in the legacy national media,” the FCC chairman said.
“Legacy media in particular, unlike local, is just wildly out of touch with where the American people are,” he added.
He noted that, because local broadcasters operate on the public airwaves, they have an obligation to provide their communities with thoughtful news coverage.
“Your local TV station, in too many cases, is simply just a mouthpiece for programming being created in Hollywood and New York. And so we’ve lost that balance of actual local news stations connected with the community,” he said at the Breitbart News policy event.
Carr credited President Donald Trump for “fundamentally reshaping the entire media ecosystem.”
“For so long, politicians just accepted the narrative that they were handed down, and they didn’t want to fight that… They just took the narrative. And President Trump fundamentally disrupted that. He set the terms of the debate,” Carr remarked.
“It really just smashed this facade that those gatekeepers get to control what we think and what we say… The legacy media is the emperor with no clothes,” he continued.
Breitbart News has reported how the FCC is open to changing the 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.
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