Big Broadcasters Plan For A Trump TV Takeover

Inside the plan to let MAGA mouthpieces monopolize the local TV news landscape.

News broadcast giants that have curried favor with President Donald Trump and disseminated right-wing talking points are now urging the administration to eliminate rules holding back their monopolization of local and national TV stations, under the guise of competition with Big Tech companies, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. Amid a multimillion-dollar lobbying and media blitz on the matter, the companies could find an ally in the country’s top communications regulator, Brendan Carr, who championed abolishing regulations limiting corporate ownership of local news stations in a Project 2025 chapter he authored that advocated for gutting the agency he now leads.

As Trump continues his crackdown on media outlets that he considers a threat, experts warn that ending the broadcast ownership caps could erode local news’ trustworthiness by allowing their parent companies to push highly partisan news stories. The Nexstar Media Group, which operates more than 200 local television stations in 116 markets across the country, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative news company that operates 185 stations in 85 markets nationwide, filed comment letters in April with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asking the agency to move forward with its proposal to gut rules barring companies from owning more than two major news channels in one market area or reaching more than 39 percent of the general public.

The ownership caps were designed to “promote localism and competition by restricting the number of media outlets that a single entity may own or control within a geographic market,” according to a 2021 Congressional analysis. But in their comment letters, the broadcast companies argue they need to purchase more stations to compete with technology companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon that have come to dominate viewership and ad revenue.

“The cap is also a relic of a bygone era and untenable in today’s media and tech regulatory environment that places no limits on how many U.S. households cable and satellite companies or streaming behemoths like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, YouTube, and others can reach,” Sinclair wrote in its comment letter to the FCC. Carr, Trump’s FCC chair, wrote a chapter on kneecapping the agency he now runs for Project 2025, the radical conservative blueprint for dismantling the federal government that Trump is now actively enacting. In the chapter, Carr claims that the FCC’s ownership rules “have the effect of restricting investment and competition because those regulations assume a far more limited set of competitors for advertising dollars than exist today.”

https://www.levernews.com/big-broadcasters-plan-for-a-trump-tv-takeover/