On a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC eliminates its cross-ownership rules for newspaper and broadcast media and for radio and TV, respectively.
The order eliminates the radio/television cross-ownership rule and newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule, while on the TV side, the “Eight-Voices Test” for independent media sources is going away, replaced by a “case-by-case review option in the Top-Four Prohibition [against any entity owning two of the top four stations in a market] to better reflect the competitive conditions in local markets.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement, “It’s a simple proposition: the media ownership regulations of 2017 should match the media marketplace of 2017.”
About the cross-ownership rule in particular, he said, “As President Clinton’s first FCC Chairman said back in 2013, this rule is ‘perverse.’ With the newspaper industry in crisis, it makes no sense to place regulatory roadblocks in the way of those who want to purchase newspapers. The media landscape has changed dramatically in the last 42 years, and the idea that a company could dominate a media market by owning a radio station and a newspaper is utter nonsense.”
