MIKE DAVIS: The rules governing local TV are older than the internet. That's insane

When FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appears before the Senate Commerce Committee on Dec. 17, Democrats will likely spend their energy projecting. After years of colluding with Big Tech to censor conservatives, they will claim that Jimmy Kimmel getting briefly suspended for his own vile comments about Charlie Kirk is somehow a threat to free speech.

But what the committee should focus on, and what should be a bipartisan issue, is the economic crisis facing America’s local news. The regulations governing local television are older than the internet as we know it. They’re not just outdated, they confer a structural advantage for the liberal media and tech giants, and a serious handicap for the conservative-leaning local voices who millions trust.

These ownership rules were designed for a 1990s world. Google did not exist. Smartphones were a decade away. Netflix was not even imaginable. Yet local TV and radio stations, the most relied-upon and trusted news sources in the country, are regulated as if it is the era of dial-up. Meanwhile, the largest technology companies on Earth, all with obvious liberal bents, operate without the artificial, government-imposed limits on how many American households they can reach that are imposed on local broadcasters.

Google-owned YouTube can saturate the country with algorithm-driven narratives and AI slop without a single federal restriction. MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), CNN and other leftwing cable conglomerates can reach nearly every household (if the public could stomach them) with no cap limiting their influence.

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Only local broadcasters, who actually reflect the values of their communities including conservative communities, remain tied to 30-year-old limits. In real terms, this means that these broadcasters have less ability to compete, less financial capacity to create their own content catering to local and regional tastes, and less leverage to make programming decisions like keeping off the air the likes of Jimmy Kimmel. Washington built the most lopsided media marketplace in modern history, and real Americans in real America pay the price.

This is why Republican leaders on the Senate Commerce Committee are sounding the alarm. They recently told Carr that today’s broadcast rules originated "in the 1940s" and remain "nearly the same as they were in the 1990s." Nearly 80 House members also warned that these rules now place broadcasters at "a severe disadvantage" against unregulated global competitors.

You can see that disadvantage in every corner of the country. Local newspapers are closing at a devastating rate. Entire counties now have no reporters at all. When local journalism disappears, unregulated tech platforms and national outlets fill the gap with leftwing content that rarely reflects conservative, rural, or middle-American priorities. Washington’s outdated rules do not protect diversity of opinion. They entrench a system where leftist coastal platforms grow more dominant while trusted local voices are boxed out.

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Here is the reality most people in Washington do not want to say out loud: Refusing to modernize broadcast ownership rules has done more to weaken local journalism than any technological shift in the past 25 years. Stations cannot scale. Newsrooms cannot expand. Communities lose coverage. And into that vacuum flows fake news, much of it amplified by foreign actors and ideologically aligned tech platforms that face no meaningful limits on reach or influence.

Carr understands that this is a "break glass moment" for local broadcasters. If Washington continues regulating local stations as if it is 1996, local TV broadcasters are in grave danger of following newspapers into oblivion. That is not far-fetched, it is an unavoidable outcome of rules that prevent trusted local broadcasters from competing on equal footing.

But it does not have to stay this way.

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Carr should move quickly to lift the outdated cap on national TV reach and modernize local broadcast ownership rules. A clear commitment now would show that America’s information infrastructure deserves the same forward-looking approach Washington applies to broadband, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies.

And the principle is simple: If global tech platforms can reach the entire nation without limitation, then the local broadcasters Americans trust should not get handcuffed by rules written before most people had an email address—and if they had a cell phone, it was in a bag in their car or had an antenna.

Local broadcasters remain the only free, local, universally accessible communications network. They are the backbone of community-level information and the last line of defense against leftist pink slime journalism funded by billionaires like George Soros and Reid Hoffman and well-heeled foreign influence campaigns.

But they cannot continue fulfilling that mission if Washington insists on binding them to the past. 

The rules governing local television are older than the internet. Which is not only insane, it is dangerous. The time to change this course is now.