Conservative television broadcasters are getting bigger under Donald Trump — and thanks to his top communications regulator, they may get enhanced power to mute the president’s critics.
The Federal Communications Commission’s approval of a $6.2 billion merger between the TV station owners Nexstar and Tegna is one step toward agency chair Brendan Carr’s goal of boosting local broadcasters’ market heft, a shift that can help them counter the programming decisions of networks such as NBC and ABC.
For his next move, Carr is considering ways to make it easier for local stations to preempt network programs without triggering breach-of-contract penalties, he told POLITICO after the FCC’s March 26 meeting.
“There’s a very healthy feedback loop when the local broadcasters could not just communicate their concerns to the national programmers but if need be, actually preempt,” said Carr, who has repeatedly expressed a desire to return to an era when stations had greater leverage against the networks. “I think we were better off. We’ve lost that.”
FCC spokespeople didn’t respond to a request for comment this week about Carr’s plans or any concerns about the politics involved.
Under confidential contracts between the networks and their affiliate stations, stations can face financial consequences if they preempt programming more frequently than the terms allow. Other repercussions could include the loss of valuable network programs such as football games or even an end to their status as network affiliates.
Carr has said those contracts have become unduly restrictive — and he has prodded network executives about what he called their attempts “to extract onerous financial and operational concessions” from stations.
Meanwhile, Carr’s team is reviewing possible ways the FCC can intervene to help local TV station owners — including, he said, a presumption intended to ensure that local broadcasters can preempt network programs without risking the loss of their affiliate agreements.
The additional preemption leeway could be especially powerful in the hands of a station owner such as Nexstar, which under the merger would become the nation’s largest TV broadcaster, owning 259 stations that reach about 80 percent of U.S. households. And it would be yet another move by Carr to check the power of networks that Trump accuses of liberal bias.
Nexstar and fellow conservative broadcaster Sinclair already flexed their muscles in September by refusing for nine days to air Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show on ABC, amid criticism by Carr and other Republicans for his remarks about the killing of pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk.
Making it even easier for stations to preempt the networks would help rebalance the media ecosystem, said Daniel Suhr, a conservative lawyer heading the Center for American Rights whose advocacy largely aligns with the FCC chair’s views.
“Preemption is really a tool to reflect the values of individual markets that wouldn’t appreciate the content from Hollywood and New York, who find it offensive or insulting,” Suhr said. “It is important at key moments, like we saw with Kimmel. And it’s one tool that does give affiliates some real leverage.”
Democrats see politics at play.
“When the FCC’s campaign to cancel Jimmy Kimmel failed thanks to the loud, public outcry from local communities, the agency quietly went looking for a censorship backdoor,” Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner, told POLITICO in a statement Friday. “That’s why it is suddenly very interested in using affiliate broadcasters to indirectly pressure networks into dropping programming it dislikes.”
Gomez lamented the agency’s “obsession with how broadcasters cover this administration.”
A growing giant
The merger between Nexstar and Tegna, which the FCC approved last month, is on hold as a federal judge in California considers a legal challenge by Democratic state attorneys general and the satellite broadcaster DirecTV. But it’s gotten a vocal endorsement from Trump.
“We need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in February. He added: “GET THAT DEAL DONE!”
U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley extended his stay on the deal last week, leaving the merger in limbo as Nexstar appeals to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Public interest groups and the conservative cable company Newsmax are separately challenging the FCC’s approval, contending it would hurt media diversity and local journalism and result in higher cable fees.
Nexstar has already closed the deal and taken ownership of Tegna, but it says it is complying with the judge’s directives to keep the two companies’ assets separate for now. As part of the FCC’s approval, Carr waved a congressionally imposed cap that says no station owner should be able to reach more than 39 percent of U.S. households.
One result of a supersized Nexstar could be more episodes like last year’s standoff over Kimmel, which flared after the ABC host suggested in his monologue that Kirk’s alleged killer had been a member of the “MAGA gang.” (Instead, officials in Utah, where the killing occurred, suggested that the suspect espoused “leftist ideology.”)
Carr leaped into the fray, telling a conservative podcaster that Kimmel’s remarks could violate the FCC’s rarely enforced rules against news “distortion,” putting ABC’s affiliate stations at risk of fines and loss of their broadcasting licenses.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said at the time. “These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action, frankly, on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, Nexstar and Sinclair said they would refuse to air Kimmel’s show, and ABC suspended the program for six days. Kimmel returned to the airwaves after the network and its parent company Disney faced a viewer boycott amid criticism that they were bowing to pressure from Trump.
Days later, Nexstar and Sinclair also restored Kimmel to their line-ups without any apparent concessions from the comedian. But under the changes Carr is contemplating, station owners would have an easier time waging a prolonged protest against shows they object to.
In the months since the Kimmel controversy, Carr has repeatedly expressed an interest in making it easier for stations to preempt the networks.
“Over the years, folks have told me they have interest in doing it, but they haven’t felt like the FCC’s got their back — they haven’t felt like they would have the ability to do it,” he told POLITICO in November. “We should look at ways of strengthening the right to preempt.”
In a letter last summer to Comcast co-CEO Brian Roberts, Carr wrote that “Americans no longer trust the national news outlets to report fully, accurately, and fairly,” citing the results of a Gallup survey and remarks by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. In contrast, Carr said, “Americans largely hold positive views of their local media outlets, including local broadcasters.”
Carr’s push against national programming echoes Trump’s attacks on what the president views as “fake news,” and accusations that some TV hosts suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
The FCC chief has separately opened investigations into or threatened a range of media companies including NBC, CBS, ABC and public broadcasters like NPR and PBS for a mix of alleged offenses, including running afoul of “equal time” rules for interviewing political candidates.
Last month, Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters he accused of “running hoaxes and news distortions.” And just this week, he opened the door toward requiring warning labels on TV shows that include discussion of transgender people or gender identity, a frequent target of Trump’s policies.
Nexstar CEO Perry Sook, meanwhile, has sharpened his own rhetoric amid the quest to get his merger approved.
In a merger commitment letter filed with the FCC last month, Sook complained that “national media organizations increasingly dictate the news agenda.”
And on stage this week at a broadcast conference, Sook dismissed the idea that Nexstar is a “behemoth” in a marketplace with rivals like Google and Netflix. He accused the Democratic attorneys general suing to stop the merger of playing politics in a midterm year.
Anxiety swirling
The prospect of GOP-friendly broadcasters removing content that Trump or his allies view as biased is unsettling parts of the industry, and even some conservatives who say the government shouldn’t meddle in the commercial relationships between networks and their affiliates. It could also further inflame Democrats’ accusations that Carr is abusing his office to muzzle Trump’s critics.
Carr’s agenda could expose him to legal action given its apparent political underpinnings, said Stuart Benjamin, who co-directs the Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law School.
“There’s a very serious question about the FCC chair using his regulatory authority to favor some companies over others, in significant part based on his sympathy for their ideology,” Benjamin said. “And that is just not consistent with the First Amendment.”
The conservative-leaning group Americans for Tax Reform warned Carr in December against interfering with how local stations handle national programming — a scenario it said is at odds with Trump’s deregulatory agenda.
And the Conservative Political Action Coalition Foundation, in its December response to Carr’s request for comments on local broadcasters’ removal of national content, warned that the FCC should intervene in broadcast practices only when there is clear public harm.
“The strength of America’s video marketplace lies in its diversity: diverse voices, diverse technologies, and diverse business models,” the group said. “Heavy-handed regulatory expansion threatens that diversity by curtailing the flexibility that has produced tremendous gains for consumers.”
Carr has said allowing local broadcasters more freedom to remove national content harkens back to the way the relationship between the two used to work, with prominent examples of extensive preemption throughout the 20th century and as recently as the early 2010s.
That period included instances when local stations would run primetime specials by televangelist Billy Graham, or when a Salt Lake City station whose owners have ties to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints refused to air “Saturday Night Live” over concerns about its appropriateness.
Meanwhile, national networks such as NBCUniversal have warned that federal meddling in their affiliate agreements with local stations could drive premium programming to streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Some communications policy veterans suspect that Carr, as with many of his initiatives, may be seeking to sway the marketplace without imposing any formal rule changes.
“I think what he probably is trying to do is influence some of the behavior,” said Jeff Westling, a senior scholar of innovation policy at the International Center for Law & Economics think tank and former legal fellow in Carr’s office. “Just use some of that jawboning style to get the outcomes that he wants.”
Still, Westling said Carr should be careful about complicating the terms of private affiliate agreements — a road that could risk unraveling key parts of broadcast TV.
“I just worry that if you impose some of those onerous restrictions on them,” he added, “you really try to meddle with it, you’re going to get to a point where the networks are just like: ‘Well, why don’t we just bypass broadcast entirely? We’re not getting that much viewership from it anymore. We can transition a lot of these folks to our streaming service.’”
