Trump FCC Prepares To Destroy Whatever’s Left Of Media Consolidation Limits

Policy

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

During Trump 1.0, his captured FCC took at absolute hatchet to what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot. The result has been a rise in local news deserts and (if you hadn’t noticed) a painfully disinformed electorate.

The Trump FCC stripped away a lot of the rules specifically so Sinclair Broadcasting, a GOP-propaganda effort posing as local news (recall the old Deadspin video?), could acquire Tribune Broadcasting for $3.9 billion. But ironically, Sinclair lied so frequently and repeatedly to regulators when selling the deal that even the dodgy, industry-friendly Trump FCC had to pull their support for appearances’ sake.

Even with media consolidation rules in tatters, the broadcast industry hasn’t been satisfied. They’ve been arguing for years that thanks to the success of streaming, there’s simply no reason to have any media consolidation limits whatsoever. Giants like ABC, Fox, NBC, and CBS are all very keen to continue their often mindless and clearly harmful consolidation spree and merge with each other.

In 2023, the Biden FCC made a fleeting, bare-bone efforts to protect whatever is left of media consolidation limits. FCC lawyers are currently in Minnesota court defending the restoration of those restrictions, but it’s expected they’ll shortly find the rug pulled out from beneath their feet by the “leadership” of Trumplican FCC boss Brendan Carr.

Even if the FCC wins the case, it’s expected that Carr will use his FCC majority to dismantle what’s left of any sort of media consolidation limits at industry’s behest:

“Carr has long supported relaxing media ownership rules and is expected to roll back the 2023 order regardless. It appears he’ll soon have the majority he needs to do that, with Democratic Commissioner Geoffrey Starks planning to step down “this spring.” That will leave two Republicans and one Democrat at the agency.”

Broadcasters claim that because streaming is so commonplace and competitive now, there’s no longer any need for any media consolidation limits whatsoever. They (falsely) claim that once these restrictions are lifted, they’ll just magically start re-investing in local markets:

“The economics in TV don’t support having more than three independent newsrooms in the vast majority of markets,” Andrew Kilberg, the attorney for the broadcasters, said. “But if they were able to access economies of scale,” he said, “they would have more resources to invest in that.”

But of course “enshittification” and the pursuit of impossibly endless quarterly growth means it doesn’t work that way. And what passes as “three independent newsrooms” in most markets now is already a homogenized mess of hollow infotainment pretending to be real journalism.

As we see in cable and streaming, consolidation routinely just results in higher prices, layoffs, worst product quality, and widespread public annoyance. Most of the same shitty consolidated companies that ruined cable TV are hard at work doing the same thing to streaming as they eye “growth for growth’s sake” and endless consolidation.

The death of newspapers and the consolidation of local broadcasters (often under the control of right wing local broadcast propagandists like Fox and Sinclair) has resulted in vast news deserts and a broadly uninformed (and misinformed) American populace. A recent study out of Northwestern University found that Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties by an average of 54 percentage points. 

Since their shitty, unpopular policies can’t stand on their own two feet, Republicans want to dismantle all useful journalism and replace it with propaganda. Democrats haven’t had any answer to the threat, routinely only paying lip service to the need for quality journalism, often rubber stamping harmful consolidation, and refusing to modernize party messaging for the modern era.

Streaming and traditional media executives alike are positively giddy for a ramp up in consolidation and enshittification under Trump. Trumpism, in turn, is excited for the continued supplanting of real journalism at the hands of contrarian engagement trolls and assorted bullshit artists. And because policy circles are largely fixated on “big tech,” media policy routinely gets kicked by the wayside.