Days before the FCC’s vote to loosen national television ownership limits, the NAB is using its seat at the table for that fight to also push regulators toward the same relief for radio’s own decades-old ownership caps as part of the 2022 Quadrennial Review.
NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt, Chief Legal Officer Rick Kaplan, and Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Jerianne Timmerman met with FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty and her senior legal advisor Marcus Maher. The meeting focused primarily on the FCC’s proposal to replace its rigid 39% national TV ownership cap with a case-by-case public interest review, but NAB used the same sit-down to also press expeditious action on the 2022 Quadrennial Review, which governs local ownership limits for both TV and radio.
The FCC formally reopened the Review last September, and NAB has used nearly every subsequent milestone to repeat the same core ask: eliminate or substantially reform local radio ownership limits that have gone unchanged since 1996. In an earlier meeting with Trusty’s and Commissioner Gomez’s staff, NAB got specific about what relief it wants: eliminating ownership limits entirely in markets ranked 76 and below, and allowing up to eight FM signals, with no cap on AM stations, in markets 1 through 75.
The two ownership fights are legally distinct, which is part of why NAB is working them in tandem rather than waiting. Like for radio, NAB’s TV argument leans heavily on scale. The group argues the cap, unchanged since before streaming and social media reshaped the video market, now prevents broadcasters specifically from gaining the reach needed to compete for advertisers and fund local news.
NAB closed its case with a line pulled from the FCC’s own 1992 order loosening radio ownership rules, arguing the industry’s “ability to function in the ‘public interest, convenience, and necessity’ is fundamentally premised on its economic viability,” arguing that logic applies just as much in 2026 as it did in 1992, and the pending review has already taken far longer than the four years Congress intended.
