The FCC voted on Thursday to remove the cap on TV station ownership in the U.S., delivering a big win to media companies aligned with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Supporters of the cap immediately said they will challenge the FCC’s action in court. They argue that only Congress has the authority to make such a change.
While the legal battle plays out, the rule change will likely mean that big station group owners like Sinclair will buy up more TV stations, furthering a shift from local to national ownership.
Thursday’s party-line vote repealed the national broadcast ownership rule, which bars a single company from reaching more than 39% of U.S. TV households over the public airwaves.
Concentration of power, the very thing democracy exists to prevent. Ignoring economics was the worst blunder of the founding fathers framing, whose bias to their own wealth ignored it’s power. For a group interested in ensuring the division of power, to fail to include their own economic power over the masses, ensured its inevitable failure. But maybe that’s because they weren’t talking about everyone being equal and free, just themselves. The peasants weren’t actually people to them, it seems.