The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to end a regulation that capped ownership of local TV stations.
In a 2-1 vote, the FCC removed the ownership cap, which prohibited ownership of local stations that reached more than 39 percent of TV homes in the United States. Removing the ownership cap has been a priority for FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who has argued the rule created an unbalanced relationship between national networks and station owners and that its removal will spur investment in local news.
Big station owners like Sinclair and Nexstar have lobbied for removal of the ownership cap. Nexstar closed a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna earlier this year that would give the combined company a reach to about 80 percent of the country, though it’s on hold due to an antitrust lawsuit brought by DirecTV and several states.
“Repealing the national cap will provide essential relief for local broadcasters by restoring a healthy counterbalance to the growing leverage of national programmers,” Carr said in prepared remarks at Thursday’s FCC meeting. “Increased scale will enable broadcasters to attract the capital and advertising revenue needed to sustain and produce trusted and community-focused news and programming. We should learn from our mistakes with the local newspaper industry, and we should not let the same thing happen to the local broadcast TV industry. Trusted sources of local reporting, broadcast over the public airwaves, are worth protecting and worth fighting for.”
