Carr Says FCC Can Go It Alone on Ownership Caps
Who wins if the ownership cap falls -- and who loses
For nearly thirty years, radio companies have lived under the same limits — no more than eight stations in the biggest markets, and fewer in smaller ones.
Now FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr says those limits aren’t written in stone — and that the FCC could raise them without Congress.
“It’s a rule-based cap, not a statutory cap,” Carr told reporters Tuesday. “As a rule-based cap, it can be modified by the FCC.”
Carr says both Republican and Democratic chairs have shared that view before. He points to former Obama-era Chair Tom Wheeler, who came to the same conclusion a decade ago.
Carr also argues that the Telecom Act was built with a bias toward deregulation. “They wanted us to consistently reassess market conditions to ensure our media ownership rules were keeping pace with the times,” he said.
That “deregulation bias” is now one of the major fault lines in the FCC’s latest ownership review.
Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez disagrees. She says Congress set those limits in law — and only Congress can change them. “I support local broadcasters,” she said, “but I worry about creating news deserts by losing local stations and newspapers.”
Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty hasn’t said which side she’s on yet. If she sides with Carr, it could set up a court fight over whether the FCC even has the power to rewrite ownership rules on its own.
Public interest groups like Free Press are already warning against it, arguing that the law doesn’t give the FCC that kind of leeway.
But the National Association of Broadcasters is firmly behind Carr. NAB president Curtis LeGeyt says the caps are outdated and block investment and innovation. Big broadcasters like Cumulus and Beasley agree — they’ve been pushing for this change for years.
For now, the process is frozen by the government shutdown. But the stakes are clear. If the FCC lifts ownership caps, the biggest players get bigger — and the small, local voices that make radio what it is could fade even further.
Many in the industry believe radio’s decline began when big companies gobbled up stations, loaded themselves with debt, and then gutted staff just to keep up with interest payments. Now there’s a move to double down on that? A lot of people in the industry think this will only speed up the death of radio.