Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the Republican-majority commission, criticized Carr’s fight against ABC in her comments at today’s FCC meeting. Carr’s FCC “seiz[ed] on a late-night comedian’s comments as a pretext to punish speech it disliked” in “an act of clear government intimidation,” she said.
Gomez said that “corporate behemoths who own large swaths of local stations across the country” continued blocking Kimmel for several days after the show returned “because these billion-dollar media companies have business before the FCC. They will need regulatory approval of their transactions and are pushing to reduce regulatory guardrails so they can grow even bigger.”
Local stations are “trapped in the middle as these massive companies impose their will and their values upon local communities,” Gomez continued. “This precise example neatly encapsulates the danger of allowing vast and unfettered media consolidation. This could drastically alter the media ecosystem and the number of voices that are a part of it.”
National ownership cap
Gomez didn’t vote against today’s action. She said the NPRM “is required by statute” and that she supports “seeking comment on these very important issues.” But Gomez said she’s concerned about consolidation limiting the variety of news and viewpoints on local TV stations.
Congress set the national ownership cap at 39 percent in 2004 and exempted the cap from the FCC’s required quadrennial review of media ownership rules. There is debate over whether the FCC has the authority to eliminate the national limit, and Gomez argued that “given the prior Congressional action, I believe that only Congress can raise the cap.”
The FCC’s “regulatory structure is in large part based on a balance of power between national networks with incentives to serve national interests and local broadcasters with incentives to serve their local communities,” Gomez said. That balance could be disrupted by a single company owning enough broadcast stations to reach the majority of US households, she said.
“In the past two weeks, the public has raised serious concerns that large station groups made programming decisions to serve their national corporate interests, not their communities of license,” Gomez said. “What is the impact of letting them get even bigger?”