Call it John Zimmer’s grand tour of the FCC. The Missouri broadcaster met with Chairman Brendan Carr and advisors from the remaining two commissioners all in one day this past week, making his case for deregulating local radio ownership caps at every stop.
Zimmer sat down with Carr and Legal Advisor Allison Howell on September 9, then held a separate meeting that same day with Marcus Maher, Senior Legal Advisor to Commissioner Olivia Trusty, according to a notice filed with the FCC. A third meeting followed with Deena Shetler of Commissioner Anna Gomez’s office, joined by the NAB’s Rick Kaplan and Jerianne Timmerman.
Across all three, his message stayed consistent: repeal the local radio ownership rules as part of the 2022 Quadrennial Review.
The effort traces back further than this week. Zimmer first petitioned the FCC for ownership rule changes in 2019, and in May, Radio Ink reported on a filing in which he argued that broadcasters now compete with platforms that didn’t exist when the caps were set. That case built on a separate victory last year, when Zimmer helped end the FCC’s TV Top-Four Prohibition in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
His central claim is that the rules, frozen in place since 1996, describe a market that no longer exists. Spotify, YouTube, SiriusXM, Pandora, Amazon Music and Apple Music didn’t factor into the FCC’s math three decades ago, and Zimmer says their rise has steadily pulled listeners, and the advertisers who follow them, away from local radio. Digital ad platforms compound the problem. In his telling, he puts local ad spending at close to three-quarters digital, with Google and Facebook alone pulling in roughly 85% of that local share, while chains like Walmart and Amazon continue to squeeze out the local retailers who once filled radio’s ad inventory.
Public safety features prominently in his case. “Only viable local broadcast stations can provide this reliable and trusted disaster alerting and emergency journalism,” Zimmer wrote in his filing, adding that “despite their greater resources, online and satellite radio outlets…do not offer these types of vital local services.”
Meanwhile, Zimmer isn’t just lobbying for rule changes in the abstract. He’s testing the limits of the current framework directly, with a pending FCC waiver request that would let him fold four Mid-West Family Broadcasting stations in Springfield, Missouri, into his existing five-station cluster there. By his own numbers, the deal would push his revenue share in the market from 8.5% to 33.6%, just shy of SummitMedia’s 34.8%, and lift his audience share from 9.2% to 21.3%, narrowly behind iHeartMedia’s 22.3%.
“Radio broadcasters must be allowed to achieve greater economies of scale to survive in a marketplace with vastly increased numbers of competitors for both listeners and advertisers,” Zimmer told the FCC.
