Outdated FCC rules put local TV stations at a disadvantage

When FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appears before the Senate Commerce Committee on December 17, Democrats will likely focus their energy on projecting. After years of colluding with Big Tech to censor conservatives, they will claim that Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension for his own vile comments about Charlie Kirk is somehow a threat to free speech.

But what the committee should focus on, and what should be a bipartisan issue, is the economic crisis facing local news in America. The regulations for local television are older than the internet as we know it. Not only are they outdated, they provide a structural advantage for the liberal media and tech giants, and a serious handicap for the conservative-leaning local voices that millions trust.

These ownership rules were designed for a 1990s world. Google didn’t exist. Smartphones were only a decade away. Netflix was not even conceivable. Yet local TV and radio stations, the most trusted and trusted news sources in the country, are regulated as if this is the age of dial-up. Meanwhile, the largest tech companies on the planet, all with clear liberal leanings, operate without the artificial government-imposed limits on the number of American households they can reach that are imposed on local broadcasters.

YouTube, owned by Google, can saturate the country with algorithm-driven storytelling and AI slop without a single federal restriction. MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), CNN and other left-wing cable conglomerates can reach almost every household (if the audience could stomach it) without limiting their influence.

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Only local broadcasters, who actually reflect the values ​​of their communities, including conservative communities, remain bound by thirty-year-old boundaries. In real terms, this means that these broadcasters have less competitiveness, less financial capacity to create their own content that caters to local and regional tastes, and less power to make programming decisions like keeping Jimmy Kimmel off the air, for example. Washington has built the most lopsided media marketplace in modern history, and real Americans in real America are paying the price.

This is why Republican leaders on the Senate Commerce Committee are sounding the alarm. They recently told Carr that current broadcast rules had their origins “in the 1940s” and “remain much the same as they were in the 1990s.” Nearly 80 members of the House of Representatives also warned that these rules now put broadcasters “at a serious disadvantage” against unregulated global competitors.

You see this disadvantage in every corner of the country. Local newspapers are closing at a devastating rate. Entire provinces now have no reporters at all. When local journalism disappears, unregulated tech platforms and national media fill the void with left-wing content that rarely reflects conservative, rural or Central American priorities. Washington’s outdated rules don’t protect diversity of opinion. They entrench a system in which left-wing coastal platforms become more dominant, while trusted local voices are excluded.

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Here’s the reality that most people in Washington don’t want to say out loud: The refusal to modernize broadcast ownership rules has done more to weaken local journalism than any technological shift in the past 25 years. Stations cannot scale. Newsrooms cannot expand. Communities lose coverage. And into that vacuum flows fake news, much of it amplified by foreign actors and ideologically aligned technology platforms that know no meaningful boundaries in reach or influence.

Carr understands this is a “breaking glass moment” for local broadcasters. If Washington continues to regulate local broadcasters like it’s 1996, local TV stations are in grave danger of following the newspapers into oblivion. That’s not far-fetched, it’s an inevitable result of rules that prevent trusted local broadcasters from competing on an equal footing.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

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Carr must take swift action to lift the outdated limit on national TV reach and modernize local broadcast ownership rules. A clear commitment now would demonstrate that America’s information infrastructure deserves the same forward-looking approach that Washington is applying to broadband, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

And the principle is simple: If global technology platforms can reach the entire country without limits, the local broadcasters that Americans rely on shouldn’t be shackled by rules that were written before most people had an email address — and if they had a cell phone, it was in a bag in their car or had an antenna.

Local broadcasters remain the only free, local, universally accessible communications network. They are the backbone of community-level information and the last line of defense against left-wing pink slime journalism, funded by billionaires like George Soros and Reid Hoffman, and against wealthy foreign influence campaigns.

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But they cannot continue to fulfill that mission if Washington insists on tying them to the past.

The rules for local television are older than the Internet. That’s not only insane, it’s dangerous. Now is the time to change this course.