press release<\/a> issued by the FCC chairman\u2019s office said that case-by-case reviews will allow mergers to exceed the 39 percent limit if the deal advances \u201clocalism, viewpoint diversity, and competition.\u201d Carr wrote in his Breitbart op-ed that there has been \u201ca steady decline in locally produced news\u201d that would be fixed by letting companies own larger numbers of stations. The current rule prevents local broadcasters from achieving the scale in operations they need to challenge competitors, he argued.<\/p>\n\u201cWhen it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the country,\u201d Carr wrote in Breitbart. \u201cThe FCC\u2019s plan to switch from a national cap to a case-by-case review allows exactly that and shifts the focus back to the American people and the local communities they live in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only Congress can change cap, critics say<\/p>\n
The planned change, set to be voted on at the commission\u2019s August 6 meeting, is certain to face legal challenges. Only Congress can change the ownership cap, Gomez and other critics of Carr say.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongress set the 39 percent national ownership cap in federal law, and only Congress has the authority to raise or eliminate it. The commission cannot waive away that limit simply because these corporate behemoths want to get out from under it,\u201d Gomez said.<\/p>\n
Gomez said the FCC tried and failed to change the cap over 20 years ago. \u201cIn 2003, the Commission raised the cap<\/a> to 45 percent under its own authority,\u201d she said. \u201cCongress stepped in within months, rewrote the law to set the cap at 39 percent, and made clear the FCC did not have the authority to change it. An FCC vote to raise the cap now would be unlawful, as it would mean doing the exact thing Congress has already said the Commission cannot do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the three-member FCC, today called Carr\u2019s plan an \u201cunlawful effort to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-765241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}