How Trump’s F.C.C. Is Reshaping TV
During the first Trump Administration, Sinclair, a company that owns almost two hundred local TV stations across the United States, and is known for its conservative bent, instructed its news anchors to recite a near-identical script on air. “The sharing of bias and false news has become all too common on social media, and more alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories without checking facts first,” the script went. “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” The message was recognizably Trumpian, and the fact that it was repeated verbatim dozens of times itself whiffed of thought control. The news site Deadspin took clips of different anchors intoning the same words and laid them over one another to make a hellish cacophony.
Last summer, Sinclair reportedly attempted to expand its empire, proposing a merger with Tegna, a broadcaster with nearly seventy stations. In the end, though, it was beaten out by a rival, Nexstar, which, in August, announced a deal to acquire Tegna for around six billion dollars. Nexstar was already the biggest station owner in the U.S. by revenue and market reach; if the acquisition went through, it would control more than two hundred and fifty stations across forty-four states and the District of Columbia. In response to a question about the Sinclair episode, Perry Sook, the C.E.O. of Nexstar, insisted that his company doesn’t “dictate content.” The following month, however, Nexstar courted controversy of its own when it refused to air the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show on its ABC affiliates, after Kimmel insinuated, in the opinion of some viewers, that a right-winger may have killed Charlie Kirk. (Sinclair also preëmpted Kimmel on its ABC affiliates.)
Hours before Nexstar pulled the plug, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, had implied that stations could face licensing consequences if they let Kimmel’s show air. (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said, memorably.) He was quick to thank Nexstar for doing “the right thing,” and has since openly endorsed its bid for Tegna, even though the F.C.C.’s review of the deal is ongoing. So, too, has Donald Trump. “We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks,” he wrote, earlier this month, on Truth Social. “GET THAT DEAL DONE!”
Many progressives, unsurprisingly, have opposed the Nexstar deal. And yet scorn has not broken cleanly along partisan lines. The pro-Trump networks One America News and Newsmax have both come out against the deal; the latter’s C.E.O., Chris Ruddy, has been perhaps its most visible critic, arguing, somewhat convincingly, that big TV companies being allowed to get bigger is an existential threat to independent outlets like his own. (Ruddy has said that NewsNation, a cable network that is owned by Nexstar, has already won more favorable terms from distributors, despite having worse ratings.) Speaking at a congressional hearing days after the Trump endorsement, Ruddy suggested that the President had been poorly advised and didn’t fully understand the matter. The politics of the issue are further scrambled when you consider that Trump at first appeared to side with Ruddy, with whom he is friendly, before U-turning.
At the heart of all this jockeying is an obscure law that prevents owners of local stations from reaching more than thirty-nine per cent of households nationwide, across all their properties. (Indeed, Trump’s initial stance centered not on the Nexstar deal but on maintaining this cap.) The way the cap is calculated isn’t straightforward, but by any measure, a combined Nexstar and Tegna would blitz through it, meaning that the cap would need to be waived, raised, or abolished for their merger to pass. Critics see the cap as a relic of a bygone age—it has its roots in the New Deal era—and an unfair handicap for companies that must nowadays compete for ad dollars with tech and entertainment behemoths. Supporters of the cap argue, variously, that companies like Nexstar are doing just fine financially, and that allowing them to grow further would be bad not only for the diversity of viewpoints on local TV—the Orwellian Sinclair video again springs to mind—but for consumer prices and journalism jobs. (Addressing Congress, Ruddy claimed that if the price of milk increased at the same rate as the fees that station owners charge TV providers, a gallon would now cost sixty-nine dollars.) Carr has suggested repeatedly that green-lighting deals like Nexstar’s would weaken the grip of New York and Hollywood liberals over TV in the heartland. Ruddy has argued the exact opposite.
The Nexstar-Tegna story is politically messy and technical, and the deal itself isn’t that big in dollars and cents. Evan Swarztrauber, a tech-policy consultant who supports lifting the ownership cap, and who advised Carr when he was an F.C.C. commissioner during Trump’s first term, pointed out to me that the valuation of the entire merger is roughly that of the breakup fee in Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. And yet, the Nexstar deal, which is comparatively under the radar, speaks to many of the same issues—from the competitiveness of traditional media companies in a world of streaming and podcasts to the shifting antitrust posture of Trump’s regulators—and more besides. The conservative Washington Examiner has rightly described the ownership-cap debate as “one of the most consequential and least understood regulatory decisions” of this moment.
Viewed another way, the deal is the latest installment in the ongoing, if asymmetric, power struggle between the executive and legislative branches. (Many proponents of waiving the ownership cap believe that the F.C.C. can do so unilaterally; many critics insist that this would be illegal without congressional approval.) The fight over the deal also represents a fresh iteration of a related trend that I wrote about last year: the tangle of small- and big-government philosophies driving the second Trump Administration, and the coalitional tensions they seem to reflect. (After Ruddy claimed that Ronald Reagan would have supported his case, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board accused him of “taking the Gipper’s name in vain.”) The cost-cutting zeal of DOGE may now feel like a distant nightmare, but deregulatory and regulatory impulses continue to coexist, not least at the F.C.C. If Nexstar, Sinclair, and their ilk may be poised to benefit from the former, networks that the Administration likes a whole lot less are already feeling the heat of the latter. And, in fact, the deployment of both, simultaneously, might not be a contradiction at all.
The congressional hearing at which Ruddy recently spoke was not your typical partisan food fight. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, and who won headlines last year for likening Carr’s comments about Kimmel to the language of a Mob boss, sounded distinctly unimpressed by the idea that the F.C.C. could simply override the will of Congress to change the ownership cap. But otherwise, he didn’t take an overt position on the merits of such a change; Steven Waldman, the founder of the media-policy group Rebuild Local News, who also testified, told me that Cruz’s opening remarks—in which he traced the history of broadcast media from “I Love Lucy” through our modern era of media fragmentation—were “almost journalistic” in their evenhandedness. Most of Cruz’s Democratic colleagues were nuanced, too. In Waldman’s testimony, he said that he sympathized, to an extent, with both proponents and critics of raising the cap—even if evidence shows that corporate mergers certainly do not guarantee greater investment in local journalism, as industry lobbyists have suggested.
At one point, Waldman had a strikingly friendly exchange with Todd Young, a Republican senator from Indiana. Young’s statement “was among the most eloquent things I’ve heard recently on the importance of community media,” Waldman told me, adding that, in his experience, Republican politicians often have “a real sense for not just the accountability aspects of journalism but the community-cohesion aspects.” This mirrored another trend that I wrote about last year—of Republican lawmakers in certain states quietly pushing bills to help revive flagging local outlets, beneath the fray of their party’s national-level war on the mainstream media. Efforts to reinvigorate local journalism are often focussed on print media, but local TV news is more widely consumed—and generally more trusted than its national counterparts. (A surprising number of local-news anchors have used that trust as a springboard to launch political careers.)
Swarztrauber claims that Carr, too, values local news. “There are people right now arguing that we should just shut down all broadcasters and sell their spectrum to wireless carriers,” he told me. “Carr’s not talking about that. He’s saying that there’s a public good here.” Certainly Carr has long talked about deregulating the airwaves, including in a chapter that he wrote for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s infamous blueprint for a second Trump term, in which he advocated “eliminating many of the heavy-handed FCC regulations that were adopted in an era when every technology operated in a silo” and “creating a market-friendly regulatory environment.” (Swarztrauber recalled a trip Carr took to visit a radio station in Wyoming “that was a Dell laptop essentially playing music,” and yet couldn’t merge with a local news outlet owing to ownership rules.) After Trump returned to office, the F.C.C. invited comment on all agency regulations as part of an initiative titled “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete.” Last week, I tuned in to the agency’s monthly open meeting, and the agenda sounded conventional, technical (“Proposing Application Limit in Upcoming NCE Reserved Band FM Translator Filing Window,” anyone?), and, at least to my untrained ear, dull.
Carr’s most attention-grabbing maneuvers, however, have been anything but. Since taking over the F.C.C., he has revived and reinterpreted regulations, or weaponized the threat thereof, in ways that have bent the arc of broadcast TV toward Trump, or sought to—not least in the Kimmel case. At a glance, then, his approach appears to be inconsistent. But a coherent project comes into view if you see his primary currency as leverage, over beneficiaries and targets alike. Craig Aaron, the co-C.E.O. of Free Press, a media-advocacy group that strongly opposes lifting the ownership cap, told me that the divergent strands of Carr’s approach are best understood “less as a contradiction and more as a merger.” The F.C.C. did not respond to my e-mail inviting Carr to comment, but he has described ending the ownership cap not only in free-market terms but as a means to “empower” smaller competitors to stand up to the major networks whose programming they carry, such that next time, perhaps, they have the leverage to keep a Kimmel off air permanently. (In the fall, Nexstar and Sinclair ended up reinstating his show, following talks with Disney, which owns ABC.) More overtly, Carr told the Times Magazine that a “realignment” is under way in how right-wingers conceive of using government power to achieve their objectives. “Conservatives have complained about media bias forever,” he said. “We’ve always relied on the idea that the free market would address it.” But “this sort of libertarian free-market answer isn’t working.”
If, as Aaron puts it, the “macro” explanation for the enduring importance of traditional broadcast TV is that lots of people still watch it, then the “micro” explanation is that one particular person still watches: Donald Trump. The President, of course, has taken aim at hostile late-night hosts—Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, of CBS, and Seth Meyers, of NBC—and called for major networks to have their licenses stripped. This is not exactly in Carr’s gift. But he does have other tools. One of those is an “equal time” rule which, like the TV-ownership cap, predates our current era of informational super-abundance. The rule holds that, under certain conditions, networks who host a political candidate for office must offer similar opportunities to their opponents. News programs have generally been exempt from this requirement, and in 2006 the F.C.C. extended the exemption to a late-night interview that Jay Leno conducted with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California. Late-night shows have apparently assumed themselves to be exempt ever since. But, in January, the F.C.C. put them on notice. “If you’re fake news,” Carr warned, at a press conference, “you’re not going to qualify.” He later confirmed that his agency has opened an “enforcement action” involving ABC, after “The View” aired an interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. (Carr has said that the rules apply to all broadcasters, but talk radio, a conservative-dominated medium, doesn’t appear to be in his crosshairs.)
Last week, Colbert claimed on his show that lawyers at Paramount Skydance, the owner of CBS, which has bowed to pressure from Trump and Carr before—and, as it happens, is trying to derail Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. with a bid that would require the Administration’s approval—blocked him from airing an interview with Talarico, for fear of triggering an equal-time review. CBS countered that it had not made a prohibition but merely offered advice, inciting a furious on-air rebuttal from Colbert, which ended with him scooping a printout of the network’s statement into a dog-poop bag. Colbert likened Carr to a “smug bowling pin” and mocked him for telling comedians to go do a streaming show or podcast if they want to get around F.C.C. rules. (“Great idea, man whose job is to regulate broadcast TV,” Colbert quipped. “It’s like when Arby’s changed their slogan to ‘Arby’s: Would it kill you to eat a salad?’ ”) At a press conference, Carr hit back that Talarico was peddling a “hoax,” and suggested that Colbert was bitter about his time in the “limelight” coming to an end. Colbert’s CBS show will indeed end, in May—a decision that itself has been seen as an act of supplication to Trump. (CBS has cited financial reasons.)
Carr’s jibe struck me as weirdly TV-centric, in a very Trumpian sense. There is now a vast media world beyond broadcast—as the foundational premise of the push to raise the TV-ownership cap reflects—and I suspect Colbert will easily find his place within it; last week, he followed Carr’s advice and uploaded his non-televised interview with Talarico to YouTube, where it racked up millions of views. (The video, and its attendant controversy, also got Talarico a fund-raising boost.) Various observers suggested that Colbert and Talarico had benefitted from the Streisand effect, in which attempts to censor information often only amplify it. Swarztrauber told me that both men “got out of this situation what they wanted.”
Not that this means Carr lost—I think CBS gave him what he wanted, too. The controversy unfolding made for “one of the most fun days I’ve had on the job,” he said. Talarico suggested that he had been censored directly by the government, which Carr compared to “that meme where someone with a bicycle takes a stick and pokes it through their own front wheel, and they end up crashing, and then they cry for help.” Carr accused journalists of falling for the charade. “Watching the arc of this story, it was so clear where it was gonna go,” he said. “It’s why so many people don’t trust the fake-news media anymore.” ♦