How long should it take an agency to comply with a deregulatory mandate from Congress? Is 30 years too long? On Feb. 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the bipartisan Telecommunications Act. That legislation envisioned that market forces and competition would make decades of New Deal-era industrial policies unnecessary. With the law, Congress told the Federal Communications Commission that the agency “shall” deregulate the television broadcasting industry as it faces more competition. Yet those rules haven’t changed much since 1996. The Trump administration needs to act before it’s too late.
While producing expensive local news, individual TV stations also must pay skyrocketing content licensing fees and deal with far more regulations than their much-larger rivals, such as cable networks or streaming services. For decades the Justice Department and the FCC have prohibited one owner from operating more than one TV station in a market or from reaching more than 39% of American households. That’s on top of a mountain of bureaucratic reporting requirements and rules about on-air content and conduct. No other video provider is constrained by the government in that way—including competitors like YouTube and Netflix, which didn’t exist in 1996. Meanwhile, many local broadcasters are gasping to stay solvent. Pressure to cut costs puts local TV news gathering in small and rural markets on the chopping block.