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The Next FCC

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T

TheBigA

What does the election mean for radio and the FCC?

Start with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. He spent the last few months auditioning for the job. If I'm Audacy, I'm looking for another billionaire investor to replace Soros, because that will not last long. There will be an investigation, and it won't go well for Audacy.

Second, all those pesky ownership regulations will start to disappear. Ajit Pai wanted to do this 8 years ago, and now there will be no roadblocks.

As far as AI, don't look to the FCC for regulations. The new FCC won't be looking for ways to control it.

Generally speaking: Mergers and acquisitions are back. Big media will get bigger. News will become smaller. No more government funding for public radio. That's just the beginning.
 
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The ownership caps will most certainly be scrapped within the next year. Also, a lot of the new employee data collection regs will be canned as well. A less onerous FCC is coming.
 
TheBigA said:
If I'm Audacy, I'm looking for another billionaire investor to replace Soros, because that will not last long. There will be an investigation, and it won't go well for Audacy.

Second, all those pesky ownership regulations will start to disappear.
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Guess the Audacy-Cumulus merger speculation will be heating up. And such a combination would not involve any divestitures if ownership caps are tossed. Would be quite a monster in markets such as DFW.
TheBigA said:
Generally speaking: Mergers and acquisitions are back.
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I would guess the Dish Network-DirecTV merger will now have clear sailing. Same for T-Mobile’s acquisition of USCellular. Etc. etc. etc.
TheBigA said:
No more government funding for public radio.
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I imagine religious broadcasters will be circling over marginal Public Radio stations, ready to swoop in when their funding dries up.
 
TheBigA said:
What does the election mean for radio and the FCC?

Start with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. He spent the last few months auditioning for the job. If I'm Audacy, I'm looking for another billionaire investor to replace Soros, because that will not last long. There will be an investigation, and it won't go well for Audacy.

Second, all those pesky ownership regulations will start to disappear. Ajit Pai wanted to do this 8 years ago, and now there will be no roadblocks.

As far as AI, don't look to the FCC for regulations. The new FCC won't be looking for ways to control it.

Generally speaking: Mergers and acquisitions are back. Big media will get bigger. News will become smaller. No more government funding for public radio. That's just the beginning.
Click to expand...
NPR only gets 1-2% of its funding from the government. It isn't an amount to sneeze at, but it's not a large part.
 
An alternate option for public stations would be to consolidate or form partnerships with other public broadcasters. For example, Colorado College in Colorado Springs created a partnership with Colorado Public Radio for KRCC some time ago.

The religious operators haven’t been buying much lately.
 
News departments will disappear, even from the networks. The ones that remain will be nothing more than Trump and GOP government news releases. The red states will have their state public networks eliminated. Longshot: The 88-92 non-comm zone is opened to commercial broadcasting. There will be religiously-based content restrictions.
 
gr8oldies said:
News departments will disappear, even from the networks. The ones that remain will be nothing more than Trump and GOP government news releases. The red states will have their state public networks eliminated. Longshot: The 88-92 non-comm zone is opened to commercial broadcasting. There will be religiously-based content restrictions.
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Governed by the tenets of exactly one religion, I'd expect.
 
gr8oldies said:
I'm thinking everything from the "funky kicks" vs "funky sh**" version of Jet Airliner to a ban on LGBTQ and other "woke" content.
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When it comes to LGBTQ+ content, the tenets of one religion are pretty similar to the tenets of several others, there's not a lot of space between conservative Christianity and conservative Islam in this sphere, for instance. Where I live, it's been the Muslim religious operators who have got themselves in hot water for broadcasting homophobic crap.
 
Mediafrog+ said:
I would guess the Dish Network-DirecTV merger will now have clear sailing. Same for T-Mobile’s acquisition of USCellular. Etc. etc. etc.
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Also (not in the FCC realm, but part of the business world), the Discover-Capital One deal will be approved.

Let's not forget that Net Neutrality will be a dead issue moving forward, which is a major victory for Big Cable ISPs (for the most part) being able to charge what they want and control what content is allowed through their networks.
 
Miss Tuned said:
When it comes to LGBTQ+ content, the tenets of one religion are pretty similar to the tenets of several others, there's not a lot of space between conservative Christianity and conservative Islam in this sphere, for instance. Where I live, it's been the Muslim religious operators who have got themselves in hot water for broadcasting homophobic crap.
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But as I understand it, discriminatory speech is much more regulated in the UK via laws. Does Ofcom have the power to pull licenses or not?
 
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radiofan2023 said:
NPR only gets 1-2% of its funding from the government. It isn't an amount to sneeze at, but it's not a large part.
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Directly, yes. But their affiliates get a large amount of funding from CPB to buy programming from NPR, APM, and other sources. So the question is if Congress defunds CPB or specifically restricts how its funding is spent. That's not an FCC issue.
 
TheBigA said:
Directly, yes. But their affiliates get direct funding from CPB to buy programming from NPR, APM, and other sources. So the question is if Congress defunds CPB or specifically restricts how its funding is spent.
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And much like they have many times before, they'll make lots of noise about doing it and when it comes time to actually vote on it, it won't pass.
 
How about having a World Streaming Commission instead, to ensure interoperability of streaming tech (maybe a requirement that older codecs [audio & audio+video] continue to be used for, say, 6 months after new codecs are deployed to ease the transition).

IMHO, terrestrial, satellite and cable radio and TV will fall by the wayside due to the advantages of streaming, let the FCC continue to regulate radio signal interference issues until the last radio & TV transmitters are shut down.

With all of the (many online) news sources, is it really necessary to limit ownership of radio and TV stations (seems like a deck chairs/Titanic situation)?


Kirk Bayne
 
TheBigA said:
RadioInk has an article on this subject:

radioink.com

What a Trump Presidency Could Mean For Broadcast Regulations - Radio Ink

Radio Ink discussed immediate broadcast regulations questions for a second Trump presidency with veteran broadcast attorney Frank Montero.
radioink.com radioink.com
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The key in that interview is that the potential new head of the FCC has limited interest in broadcast stations and likely will not look to do anything except relax regulations on group ownership and market concentrations. The FCC does not regulate content except for limited and ill-defined obscenity and profanity. It regulates "Equal Time" and "Lowest Unit Rate" and the rest is technical and ownership based.

Any efforts to regulate programming content will immediately hit the First Amendment wall and that is not likely a mission the administration can benefit from.

On the other hand, outside of the FCC there are possibilities of the reduction of NPR funding, scaling down or eliminating the VOA and the like. All of these are minor items but if the rumored appointment of Musk as an overspending control czar is true, we could see lots of non-essential government agencies like this closed or curtailed.
 
kfbkfb said:
How about having a World Streaming Commission instead, to ensure interoperability of streaming tech (maybe a requirement that older codecs [audio & audio+video] continue to be used for, say, 6 months after new codecs are deployed to ease the transition).
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No agency that has the "World" word in its name has ever really been able to control anything world-wide. Even the United Nations, which has served a useful purpose of creating a forum, is useless in controlling things like the Ukraine War, the Fundamentalist Terror groups, North Korea's atomic weapons or, in the past, everything from the Korean War and the Iron Curtain to Vietnam to name just a few.
 
DavidEduardo said:
On the other hand, outside of the FCC there are possibilities of the reduction of NPR funding, scaling down or eliminating the VOA and the like.
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I could easily see all VOA-branded programming eliminated. More interesting question is the future of the multiple separately branded broadcasts to various areas and ethnicities of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China. Then you have Radio Marti. Could Marti be privatized? If the Cuban diaspora wants programming sent into that country, would they pay for it directly?
 
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