Pai told TVNewsCheck he felt the proposal to eliminate the agreements would hurt smaller broadcasters. “We are talking about stations in the 100 or 200 biggest markets, which have a miniscule portion of the revenue of, say, a New York City station. A JSA or SSA (shared service agreements) can mean the difference between consolidating operations and saving costs.”
Okay, so how do you distinguish between a JSA/SSA that helps keep a smaller broadcaster afloat, and one that hides the fact the "smaller broadcaster" is just a subsidiary of the larger broadcaster? How do you enact a policy that protects smaller broadcasters without ultimately covering for larger ones? Right now Wikipedia just assumes that any JSA/SSA is in fact a virtual duopoly, including when "local independent or private companies" are the listed owners of the station. How do you know that, say, "RKM Media" is just a cover for Sinclair to deny it actually owns WMYS, as opposed to Sinclair simply operating the station on behalf of a local ownership group that couldn't hang on to the station on their own, which is pretty much how these agreements are supposed to work?
Not convinced the proposal in the article is the solution. Any solution needs to recognize the reality of today's TV business, where automation is so easy that once you control a station's news, it's just a hop, skip, and jump from there to controlling the whole station. In that sense, what
are the obligations of someone who owns a station?
How exactly does Cunningham make money for Sinclair, or do Cunningham- (and perhaps more to the point, Deerfield-) owned stations actually make money for people not directly involved with Sinclair, while Sinclair makes less money than if they owned the station outright? If the latter, I'm not sure it's as much of a problem as it's made out to be. If the former, it's got to be in some way the FCC can take on directly - perhaps through limits on how much of the money from a JSA/SSA can go to the operating company, perhaps by imposing ownership limits on individuals rather than companies.
I still wonder if a dynamic cap is feasible or a good idea, where any second station, owned or controlled, counts as one-half the market's size toward the ownership cap, the third station counts as one-third, and so on, rather than imposing arbitrary thresholds a market has to cross before the FCC allows duopolies or triopolies. Perhaps also impose local caps where one owner can't control more than X% of a market's market share (as long as the FCC is still using the Nielsen markets and already has the two-of-the-top-four rule), unless one station accounts for that much by itself.
