Sinclair Broadcasting has been doing heavy propaganda lifting for right-wing lunatics for some time now. The Sinclair Broadcasting business model consists of taking their 40 percent penetration of the American market, and expanding it to over 70 percent through an almost $4 billion merger with Tribune Media. In the past, the monopolistic impact that Sinclair Broadcasting is clearly going for would be somewhat offset by FCC regulations that would force the company to sell off some of its local assets. Which is why rumblings that the FCC would roll back those regulations, by using words like “soften” and “relax,” are incredibly distressing. As Mother Jones points out, the Republicans on the FCC made sure that they did everything their overlords asked them to.
The five-member FCC, led by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai, voted on Thursday to loosen the rules on owning multiple TV and radio stations in the same market. The FCC’s announcement helps pave the way for Sinclair’s mega-merger with Tribune Media, a deal that would give the company well over 200 TV stations, including in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the country’s three biggest media markets. The FCC also voted to remove the 40-year-old ban on a company owning a newspaper and a TV or radio station in the same media market as part of the FCC’s deregulatory spree on Thursday.
Before Thursday’s vote, Sinclair faced the prospect of offloading some of its stations if the Tribune deal went through in order to stay under a national ownership cap for broadcast companies—another rule the Trump FCC could potentially jettison. But Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Communications and Technology Law Clinic at the Georgetown’s Institute for Public Representation says the FCC’s latest round of deregulation may allow Sinclair to retain more of its stations should the Tribune deal get approved. “It makes it possible for the deal to go through, and the changes yesterday reduce or completely eliminate the number of stations they’ll have to divest,” Schwartzman says. In short, thanks to the FCC, Sinclair would emerge from the Tribune merger even larger and more lucrative than previously expected.
FCC chair and Verizon shill Ajit Pai has all kinds of stocking stuffers in last week’s decision, including getting rid of all those low-income consumers that telecom companies didn’t want to serve anymore. The fact that these decisions so clearly follow the exact wish lists of the companies the FCC is supposed to in part protect consumers from has led two Democratic representatives as well as 15 Democratic senators to send two letters calling for an investigation into the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s merger with Tribune media in regards to the FCC.
“We have strong concerns that the FCC’s ongoing review of the proposed merger of Sinclair Broadcasting and Tribune Media may be tainted by a series of actions and events that raise questions about the independence and impartiality of the FCC,” the senators wrote. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) spearheaded the letter.
[...]
The senators also object to Pai’s proposal to allow broadcasters to begin the use of a next generation TV standard, which will fuse over-the-air TV with internet capabilities such as targeted advertising. Critics note that Sinclair holds patents over the technology, and the senators contend that the FCC’s move “would allow Sinclair to establish and maintain a monopoly over its patented technology.”
The senators called for Pai to recuse himself from anything related to the Sinclair/Tribune merger. Pai, Republicans, and big telecoms have been using the term “modernizing” in the hopes of clouding how much wool they are pulling over everyone’s eyes. This was former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s warning from an interview he did with Susan Crawford at Harvard Law School back in January of this year. He was asked about the lingo of “modernizing” being used by Republicans and people like Ajit Pai.
It’s a fraud. The FTC doesn’t have rule-making authority. They’ve got enforcement authority and their enforcement authority is whether or not something is unfair or deceptive. And the FTC has to worry about everything from computer chips to bleach labeling. Of course, carriers want [telecom issues] to get lost in that morass. This was the strategy all along.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the Trump transition team — who were with the American Enterprise Institute and basically longtime supporters of this concept — comes in and says, “Oh, we oughta do away with this.” It makes no sense to get rid of an expert agency and to throw these issues to an agency with no rule-making power that has to compete with everything else that’s going on in the economy, and can only deal with unfair or deceptive practices.
Because we’re talking about one sixth of the economy. More importantly, we’re dealing with the network that connects six sixths of the economy.