Supreme Court Hears FCC Case For Looser Media Ownership Regulations

The Supreme Court waded into a two-decade long debate over the extent to which the Federal Communications Commission can relax media ownership rules. At stake are recent FCC moves toward deregulation, allowing the common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast stations in the same market, as well as giving more leeway for media companies to own more than one TV and radio outlet in the same city. The dispute stretches back two decades, a few years after the FCC began a new, congressionally mandated requirement to regularly review its media ownership rules to determine whether they were still necessary in the public interest. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has repeatedly rejected the FCC’s efforts to modify the rules, and most recently a 2017 effort to overhaul the ownership restrictions. The appeals court determined that that effort failed to adequate analyze the effect that the rule changes would have on women and minority ownership of broadcast stations. 

Attorney Ruthanne Mary Deutsch was the lead counsel for a coalition of public interest groups, led by Prometheus Radio Project and including the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, contends that the FCC has “historically considered the values of localism and five different types of diversity: ‘viewpoint, outlet, program, source, and minority and female ownership diversity.'” The groups wrote in a brief last month that the FCC majority, in relaxing the ownership limits, “justified its action based on an arbitrary analysis of the same facts: It asserted that wholesale deregulation would not harm this public-interest goal—even though any reasonable analysis of the record showed that past deregulation caused harm.”