Edward Woodson writes for American Greatness about an outdated federal media restriction.
Conservatives spend a lot of time debating how to counter the power of the liberal media. Some say build new platforms. Others say to fight bias on the ones that already exist. But there is one simple step that almost everyone on the Right should agree on: stop letting Washington handicap conservative broadcasters.
A single outdated FCC TV ownership cap, dating back to the 1940s, is doing just that, limiting TV station groups to reaching no more than 39 percent of U.S. television households. That number was invented in a different era, when most people had only a few channels and no internet or streaming. It was written for the age of rabbit-ear antennas, not smartphones and smart TVs.
Today, Americans get their news from cable, satellite, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and social media feeds curated by Big Tech. Liberal outlets thrive on these platforms with virtually no comparable federal constraint. Yet broadcast television, one of the last places where conservatives can realistically reach millions of undecided voters, is still stuck under an arbitrary reach limit written decades ago. Surveys continue to find that local broadcast TV news is among the most trusted sources of information, often beating social media and even cable news.
Trump-appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr, whom Trump first nominated to the commission in 2017, has pointed out how these rules apply to broadcasters but not to Big Tech or streaming giants.
He’s right. This outdated rule doesn’t protect viewers or diversity of thought. It protects the status quo.
By preventing right-leaning broadcasters from growing, the cap freezes the old media balance in place. Liberal legacy networks with decades of brand recognition keep their advantage. Conservative broadcasters who want to expand and challenge the cartel are told to stay in their lane.
