Americans no longer trust the legacy national media to report the news fairly or accurately. In fact, only eight percent of Americans have a great deal of trust in mass media. That figure is even lower among Republicans—sitting at a mere three percent.
But it wasn’t always this way. All the way up through the 1990s, the majority of Americans trusted the media. When they turned on their TV, they felt like they were watching balanced programming that reflected their values. Reporters and journalists that lived in the same communities as their viewers anchored daily and nightly news shows at the local TV station. They reported facts and won awards for their gumshoe reporting. The media was respected.
And that is exactly how Congress intended the broadcast industry to operate. As Congress provided in the Communications Act, the FCC licenses local broadcast TV stations and, in turn, those stations have an obligation to operate in the public interest—not a narrow, partisan one. Broadcasters understood that meeting their public interest obligations meant identifying and responding to the needs of the local communities they were licensed to serve.
So what changed? For one, New York and Hollywood interests have steamrolled those local TV stations and the broader media market in recent years in ways that run directly counter to the regulatory framework that Congress and the FCC put in place.
Here’s how. You can think about the broadcast industry as falling into two separate camps. On the one hand, you have hundreds of local broadcast TV stations that are licensed by the FCC to serve their local communities. On the other hand, you have companies known as national programmers, like Comcast and Disney. The latter create most of the national news, entertainment, and other programs that air on local broadcast TV stations today. Their national programs naturally reflect the values of the New York and Hollywood executives that produce them. This power imbalance has contributed to a steady decline in locally produced news—and with it, a weakening of the public’s trust in the media.
Not surprisingly, the interests of local TV stations and national programmers do not always align. In fact, they compete with each other on many fronts—from the prices that national programmers charge local TV stations for the privilege of distributing their shows to the rights of TV stations to preempt or not broadcast shows that do not align with the interests of their local communities.
To help ensure a healthy balance of power between national programmers and local broadcasters, the FCC adopted rules decades ago that operate as structural safeguards. One such rule is known as the national ownership cap.
The cap generally prevents any one entity from owning so many TV stations that they could broadcast programming to more than 39 percent of TV households. The FCC adopted the cap to restrain the power of national programmers and their New York and Hollywood interests. The FCC wanted to deny national programmers the outsize power that could come from operating as both a national programmer and as an owner of TV stations with significant national reach.
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. For instance, if a national programmer pressured a local TV station to run a program that the broadcaster viewed as out of sync with the interests of their community, they could refuse to air it. That right to preempt makes sense. After all, a national program that might be a good fit for a TV station in San Francisco might not make sense for one in Salt Lake City. This healthy give and take between local broadcaster and national programmer—reinforced by the national cap—helped ensure that the broadcast TV model worked for the American people.
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.
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.
Nor does the cap limit other players in today’s media market. Cable channels like MSNOW can reach 100 percent of the country. Social media sites from Bluesky to X can reach 100 percent of the country. Netflix can reach 100 percent too. Same with podcasts and all other forms of digital content.
But the 39 percent cap continues to apply uniquely to the owners of local broadcast TV stations—forcing the market out of balance. Today, the cap is not protecting local broadcasters, it is preventing them from gaining the same scale that their competitors are free to enjoy. In other words, the national cap is now doing the exact opposite of what the FCC intended.
The results speak for themselves. Local TV stations today lack the power to preempt or refuse to air national programming that does not fit their communities’ values. National programmers are now charging local TV more and more for the privilege of airing their shows. Local TV stations are struggling to find the resources to produce live, trusted, and local news programming. Many local broadcast TV stations are getting hollowed out as a result and turning into little more than mouthpieces for programming produced in New York and Hollywood. That is not what Congress or the FCC intended.
It’s time to restore balance to the broadcast airwaves. And the FCC has a plan to do just that.
On August 6, the FCC will vote on eliminating the outdated national cap in favor of a new case-by-case approach. Previously, the cap operated as a blanket prohibition on any and all deals that would combine stations in excess of the 39 percent limit—regardless of whether it was a good deal or a bad one for the country. Our new proposal would allow the FCC to approve deals that exceed the 39 percent cap, but only if doing so would promote the public interest.
Repealing the national cap will provide essential relief for local broadcasters by restoring a healthy counterbalance to the growing leverage of national programmers. Increased scale will enable broadcasters to attract the capital and advertising revenue needed to sustain and produce trusted and community-focused news and programming.
If the FCC does not act, we do not need to imagine the bleak media future ahead. Just look at local newspapers. Much like the national cap, the FCC maintained an outdated rule for more than 40 years that limited investment in local newspapers. The FCC kept that rule in place until 2017, long after the economics of local journalism had shifted. Meanwhile, local newspapers shut down by the dozen, and many Americans are now left to choose from a small number of national papers. We can’t let local broadcast TV follow the same path.
When it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the country. The FCC’s plan to switch from a national cap to a case-by-case review allows exactly that and shifts the focus back to the American people and the local communities they live in.
Brendan Carr is the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.