FCC repeals national TV ownership cap, a win for Trump-aligned broadcasters

(CNN) — The FCC voted on Thursday to remove the cap on TV station ownership in the US, delivering a big win to media companies aligned with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Supporters of the cap immediately said they will challenge the FCC’s action in court. They argue that only Congress has the authority to make such a change.

While the legal battle plays out, the rule change will likely mean that big station group owners like Sinclair will buy up more TV stations, furthering a shift from local to national ownership.

Thursday’s party-line vote repealed the national broadcast ownership rule, which bars a single company from reaching more than 39% of US TV households over the public airwaves.

FCC chair Brendan Carr said the rule will be replaced by a “case-by-case review” process, giving him more power over deals involving local TV stations across the country.

Carr said his intent is to support the local TV ecosystem and “stop hamstringing this one segment of the broader market with outdated restrictions.”

Carr’s critics said that’s just a cover story. “His goal is to spur more media consolidation involving companies Donald Trump views as ideological allies and corporate cronies,” said Matt Wood, general counsel for the public interest group Free Press, which vowed to sue over the rule repeal.

The repeal passed 2-1, with Carr and fellow Republican commissioner Olivia Trusty voting yes and the commission’s sole Democrat, Anna Gomez, voting no.

Gomez defended the long-established cap as a “structural safeguard to preserve localism, viewpoint diversity, and competition.”

Ever since broadcast TV was invented, the US government has tried to promote those values by limiting the number of stations that a single company can own. For almost as long, ambitious station owners have tried to get the government to loosen up.

In the 1980s, the FCC’s ownership cap was set at 12 stations reaching no more than 25% of TV households. In the 1990s — amid intense lobbying by station owners — Congress got involved, removed the 12-station limit, and raised the cap to 35%.

The executive and legislative branches have tangled over the issue for decades.

When Carr announced last month that he was scheduling Thursday’s vote, Sen. Ted Cruz said, “I am skeptical a change can be made absent an act of Congress.”

Democrats have gone further. “Trump’s FCC Chair is trying to illegally rewrite the rules to make it easier for billionaires to line their own pockets while jacking up costs and controlling what Americans watch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a statement following Thursday’s vote. “This looks like the Trump administration’s latest attempt to roll out the red carpet for more antitrust disasters.”

At Thursday’s FCC meeting, Carr repeated his view that the ownership rule is outdated in the Big Tech age. In a pitch to Trump fans, he also called it a way to “restore balance to the broadcast airwaves.”

Nexstar, the country’s largest TV station owner, hailed the decision as a “necessary and long-overdue recognition of today’s competitive landscape.” The company added: “For too long, local broadcasters were handcuffed from reaching the scale they needed to compete on a more level playing field by outdated federal rules that didn’t apply to the largest and most powerful companies like Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, or Netflix.”

Gomez said in a statement that “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,” Gomez continued. “Trading a squeeze from Big Tech for a squeeze from Big Media does nothing to protect the communities this cap was designed to serve.”