MIKE DAVIS: Why we must drop antiquated rule shackling TV in streaming era

America’s local television stations do something at which the coastal media class loves to sneer but upon which ordinary families rely every day: They cover school board fights, city hall scandals, high school championships, church fish fries, snow storm and tornado warnings and the first minutes of a crisis when cell networks clog and rumors flood social media.

So why does Washington still treat these hometown institutions like it is 1941?

Back then, the federal government imposed a national limit on how many local TV stations one company could own. Decades later, that restriction has morphed into today’s “national audience reach” cap, a rule prohibiting any broadcast station group from owning stations that reach more than 39% of America’s TV households. 

These restrictions, however, don’t affect cable networks, satellite networks, national networks or streaming giants. This includes Google, Meta and other Big Tech monopolists that hoover up local ad dollars and decide what information people see with opaque algorithms. Local broadcasters are the only major video and news platform in America told by the federal government: you may not scale up.

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That isn’t “pro-competition.” It’s pro-cartel.

The FCC’s own record shows how old this rule really is. The original national TV ownership limit dates to the early days of television, a 1941-era policy choice made before the internet, before cable, before satellite, before smartphones, before YouTube, before streaming. And while Congress nudged the cap upward in the 1990s and early 2000s, it has been stuck at 39% since 2004, even as the marketplace for what you see on your screens transformed beyond recognition.

Here is the part Washington often misses: voters see the unfairness, too.

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New polling has just been released by Fabrizio-Ward showing a majority of Americans oppose this outdated ownership cap. By a 38-point margin, voters view the restriction on local TV station ownership as unfair. Even more striking, by an eight-to-one margin, voters who get their local news from TV say they would be less likely rather than more likely to vote for a member of Congress who opposes letting local TV station owners compete nationally for advertising against cable networks and internet streamers.

That is not a policy footnote. That is a political warning label.

For years, defenders of the 39% cap have recycled the same talking points: “diversity,” “localism” and the claim that bigger station groups will somehow erase local voices. But in 2026, the real threat to viewpoint diversity is not that a broadcaster might operate more stations. It is that a handful of Big Tech platforms control the pipes of digital distribution with zero ownership caps and minimal transparency.

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If we want more local emergency coverage, more local investigative reporting and the stories that matter to everyday Americans, we should stop starving the one system that still delivers news for free to every American household.

The national ownership cap does nothing to stop the real concentration in media. It does nothing to limit the reach of a streaming platform. It does nothing to limit a cable channel. It does nothing to limit the distribution power of social media feeds. It only limits the people who still have FCC licenses, public obligations and a daily habit of showing up in local communities.

So what should conservatives do?

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First, stop apologizing for wanting a fair market. If you believe in competition, then competition has to be real. A rule that uniquely handcuffs one sector while its competitors operate with no comparable limits is not regulation. It is protectionism.

Second, take action. The FCC has an open proceeding on this issue and it should finish the job and repeal the cap. It has both the authority and the responsibility to remove this outdated bureaucratic rule that puts a heavy thumb on the scale for Big Tech at the expense of local stations and local stories.

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Conservatives have a choice: defend an arbitrary cap that makes Big Tech stronger or scrap it and let local TV compete, invest and serve – not only in cities, but from sea to shining sea across the great expanses of our big, beautiful nation.

Voters are watching. And the numbers say they will remember who stood with their local communities and their stations when it counted.