FCC Moves to Scrap the 85-Year-Old 39% Ownership Cap — and the Industrial Language Missing From Korea's Broadcast Debate

FCC Moves to Scrap the 85-Year-Old 39% Ownership Cap — and the Industrial Language Missing From Korea's Broadcast Debate

Aug. 6 vote would replace the blanket national cap with case-by-case public interest review — a starting gun for mega-consolidation among Nexstar, Sinclair and their peers

While Washington argues over broadcast survival in industrial terms, Seoul remains locked in 'normalization' fights over public-broadcaster boards — ownership deregulation nowhere in sight

The last pillar of U.S. national broadcast ownership regulation is coming down. On August 6, the Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate the rule that bars any single broadcaster from reaching more than 39% of U.S. TV households, replacing the blanket limit with a case-by-case review of each transaction against the agency's public interest standard. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr confirmed the plan on July 15 through an op-ed and an official FCC announcement. It comes 85 years after the first national ownership restrictions of 1941, and 22 years after Congress fixed the cap at 39% in 2004.

Behind the push is the collapse of the economics that once sustained local broadcasting. In Nielsen's The Gauge for April 2026, broadcast fell to 19.9% of total U.S. TV time while streaming held 47.6%. Streamers and virtual pay-TV distributors like Netflix and YouTube TV can deliver programming to 100% of the country with no reach restriction of any kind, while local station owners alone remain bound by the 39% ceiling. Cord-cutting is squeezing retransmission fees and advertising at the same time, and U.S. television news employment has been shrinking since its 2021 peak, down 3.3% in 2024. Station groups have demanded the scale to compete with big tech, and the FCC of the second Trump administration has now answered.

"We Can’t Let Local TV Follow the Newspaper Path" — Carr’s Case

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr

In an op-ed published by the conservative outlet Breitbart, Carr argued that the 39% cap applies uniquely to local broadcast station owners and is “forcing the market out of balance.” National programmers, he noted, already distribute to the entire country through their own streaming services or through carriage deals with nationwide virtual cable providers such as YouTube TV — and he went down the list of players the cap does not touch: cable channels like MS NOW, social platforms from Bluesky to X, Netflix, podcasts and every other form of digital content, all reaching 100% of the country while local broadcast stations stop at 39%.

He reached for the newspaper industry as a cautionary tale. The FCC kept its newspaper investment restriction in place for more than 40 years before finally repealing it in 2017 — by which time local papers had closed by the dozen and many Americans were left choosing among a handful of national titles. Today, Carr wrote, the cap is “not protecting local broadcasters” but blocking them from the scale their competitors freely enjoy, and local TV cannot be allowed to follow the same path. Speaking the same day at the Hill Nation Summit, he said the rule has been holding local broadcasters back from the scale they need to invest in local news and journalism.

The FCC drew one line: removing the cap does not mean automatic approval. In its statement, the agency said transactions exceeding the old 39% limit that do not promote the public interest will be denied, while deals that exceed the cap but do serve the public interest could win approval.

It is also worth knowing that the cap has long been porous in practice. The FCC has allowed common ownership of multiple stations in a single market under certain conditions; the “UHF discount” counts only half of a station's reach toward the cap when its over-the-air signal is ultra high frequency; and shared services agreements let an owner operate another company's station without technically owning it. This month's move sweeps away a rule already full of holes and replaces it with regulatory discretion.

The Battlefield in Numbers — Broadcast 19.9% vs. Streaming 47.6%

Nielsen's The Gauge, April 2026 — share of total U.S. TV time. Source: Nielsen (nielsen.com/thegauge)

Share of total TV time, March 30–April 26, 2026. Source: Nielsen The Gauge / Media Distributor Gauge

Actual viewing data underpins Carr's argument. Nielsen's April 2026 Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge, released June 25, put streaming at 47.6% of total TV time, cable at 21.6% and broadcast at 19.9% — broadcast now the third-place category, behind even cable. By distributor, YouTube held the top spot at 13.4%, Disney ranked second at 10.3%, Paramount fourth at 7.9%, and Netflix stood at 7.8% on its own.

Read against the 39% debate, the numbers carry a pointed implication: a single distributor facing no ownership limit whatsoever — YouTube, at 13.4% — now commands roughly two-thirds as much viewing as the entire broadcast category, which dozens of station groups divide among themselves under the cap. Amazon Prime Video climbed to 4.2% on the strength of 22 NBA Play-In and playoff games plus the final season of The Boys, and the free ad-supported streamer Tubi hit a platform-best 2.3%, as streaming absorbs sports rights and FAST viewing that once belonged to broadcast. Broadcast's April highlights were the final round of the Masters on CBS and dramas like Tracker.

The data does not read only one way, however. Opponents argue that competition between platforms and concentration within broadcasting are separate questions: a shrinking broadcast share does not erase the damage to news diversity when station ownership in a local market falls into fewer hands. The same numbers serve one side as the case for scale and survival, and the other as a warning of deepening concentration inside a shrinking pie.

Nexstar, Sinclair and the NAB: "Common Sense"

Industry reaction was uniformly celebratory. NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt applauded Carr's leadership, saying decades-old ownership restrictions that apply only to broadcasters — and to none of their competitors — are “out of step with today's media marketplace,” and arguing that removing the cap will empower local stations to invest in and serve their communities with trusted, freely available news, sports and entertainment.

Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley, whose company has the most room to expand its national reach, said it should not be controversial to suggest that “changed facts should lead to changed rules,” calling the move common sense. Nexstar said in a statement that the rules were last updated “before Netflix streamed a single movie,” before the first iPhone and before Instagram, and that local broadcasters are still forced to compete under rules written for a competitive landscape that disappeared with the VCR — no one, the company noted, suggests limiting the reach of YouTube, Amazon or CNN.

"It Is the Law" — The Fight Over Congressional Authority

Opponents challenge the FCC's authority itself. Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez shot back that the cap reflects Congress's judgment that excessive concentration threatens competition, localism and viewpoint diversity: “It is not a suggestion. It is the law.” She characterized the effort as an unlawful attempt to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire allies of the administration, warning it would destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting and raise costs for families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. Congress wrote the 39% cap into federal law in 2004, the argument runs, and only Congress can raise or eliminate it.

Objections came from the pay-TV side as well. DIRECTV Chief Legal Officer Michael Hartman said the evidence shows that “broadcaster consolidation leads to higher prices for consumers,” while there is no evidence that greater national consolidation improves local programming or journalism — a response shaped by the reality that pay-TV distributors must face ever-larger station groups across the retransmission bargaining table.

Free Press vice president of policy Matt Wood signaled litigation, saying Carr “cannot undo the limit that Congress set” simply because he feels like it. With the Supreme Court's 2024 repeal of the Chevron doctrine — the principle of judicial deference to agency statutory interpretation — courts are seen as less likely to accept an expansive FCC reading, meaning that even if the August 6 vote passes, the final word will likely come from the bench.

The Preview Already Playing — Nexstar-Tegna

The preview of this decision was Nexstar's acquisition of Tegna. In March, over objections from Democratic-led states, the FCC approved the $3.54 billion sale and waived the 39% rule in doing so. If courts do not reverse the transaction, Nexstar's reach extends to 80% of U.S. TV households. A federal judge has halted the deal pending an antitrust challenge brought by a coalition of state attorneys general. President Trump said in February that he supports the transaction.

Political noise follows the file. Trump has repeatedly pressed Carr to revoke the licenses of Comcast-owned NBC and ABC stations, and Carr ordered an unusual early license review of Disney's eight owned-and-operated ABC stations — moves critics call a violation of broadcasters' free speech rights. The character of the power at stake has already been on display: in September 2025, after Jimmy Kimmel's remarks on the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Nexstar and Sinclair announced they would preempt ABC's late-night show, and Disney pulled it for several days before returning it to air. A company holding local stations at scale can exert real force over a national network's programming — a fact that feeds the view that deregulation's benefits will flow to Trump-aligned station groups.

The Workaround That Was Already Open — the Gray-Scripps Swaps

The shift to case-by-case review largely institutionalizes a practice that has been running on waivers. On July 7, 2025, Gray Media and E.W. Scripps agreed to swap television stations across five mid-sized and small markets, creating new duopolies for each group. The deal is an even exchange of comparable assets — the consideration for each transaction is the performance of the other, so no cash changes hands — with both sides targeting a simultaneous fourth-quarter 2025 close pending regulatory approval.

Under the swap, Gray receives Scripps' Fox affiliate WSYM in Lansing, Michigan (DMA 113) and ABC affiliate KATC in Lafayette, Louisiana (DMA 125). WSYM creates a Lansing duopoly alongside Gray's NBC station WILX, while KATC reinforces Gray's Southeast footprint spanning every other Louisiana market. Scripps takes Gray's CBS station KKTV in Colorado Springs (DMA 86), where it already owns NBC affiliate KOAA; NBC station KKCO and low-power ABC KJCT-LP in Grand Junction (DMA 187); and CBS station KMVT with low-power Fox KSVT-LD in Twin Falls, Idaho (DMA 189) — thickening a Western belt that runs through Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California.

Both companies framed the deal as building the market scale and depth to strengthen financial durability, and with it the local news and sports programming they provide as a public service. Gray President and Co-CEO Pat LaPlatney said the company anticipates “expanding the news staff and hours of live local newscasts” at both stations soon after closing, and Scripps President and CEO Adam Symson said the stations would let Scripps extend its local sports and news strategies in key growth geographies, with the resulting efficiencies funding deeper community coverage. Gray is the largest owner of top-rated local stations, reaching roughly 37% of U.S. TV households across 113 markets; Scripps operates more than 60 stations in over 40 markets plus national networks including ION and Bounce.

The problem is that the combination collides head-on with the FCC rule limiting an owner to one top-four station per market. The companies' own release acknowledged that approval will require waivers of what they called outdated local ownership restrictions that have uniquely constrained broadcasters' ability to compete. Symson told the trade publication TVNewsCheck that the FCC and Carr had signaled readiness to allow multiple Big Four stations in a market and openness to using waivers, and that he expected approval to come that way. The Media Bureau had in fact granted a waiver in June 2025 letting a single operator hold the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox signals in the Greenwood-Greenville market in Mississippi — a decision the cable trade group NCTA protested over the transparency of the approval process.

Outlook — The Next Phase of Local TV Consolidation

With Republicans holding the FCC majority, the August 6 vote is likely to pass, and the fight then moves to the courts. If the cap actually falls, mega-consolidation among station groups follows: beyond Nexstar-Tegna, Sinclair is reported to have held talks to acquire E.W. Scripps, and removing the cap unbolts that deal and every other combination the 39% wall has blocked. Analysts suggest today's duopoly markets could be reorganized into three- and four-station holdings under single owners.

The Message for Korea

From a K-content distribution standpoint, this decision changes who the gatekeepers of the U.S. market are. A broadcast supergroup reaching 50–80% of U.S. TV households is not just a chain of local stations: like Scripps with ION and Bounce, or Nexstar with NewsNation and its digital channel portfolio, it is an integrated distributor bundling national networks, FAST channels and streaming apps. For Korean content companies, that creates a single counterparty capable of delivering nationwide coverage in one contract — and, at the same time, a sharper asymmetry of bargaining power as programming decisions concentrate in a few groups. Partner portfolios for the U.S. market will need to be redrawn around which group ends up holding which markets and which distribution assets.

FAST strategy picks up a new variable. Consolidated station groups will bundle the news and sports content of hundreds of local stations with advertising inventory and viewing data to build out their own FAST and CTV businesses. Korean FAST strategy for the U.S., long organized around manufacturer platforms such as Samsung TV Plus and LG Channels, now gains broadcaster-owned FAST as a serious second axis. As competition for channel slots controlled by station groups intensifies, the smarter approach shifts from launching individual channels toward structuring content supply agreements and advertising revenue-share models together.

On the infrastructure side, expanded coverage for operators like Sinclair — the leading force behind next-generation terrestrial transmission — widens the base for nationwide commercialization of ATSC 3.0 broadcasting and datacasting. For anyone pursuing Korea-U.S. channel and service partnerships over terrestrial networks, how far a partner's transmission coverage stretches after consolidation translates directly into changed business terms.

The sharper lesson lies in the character of the two countries' regulatory debates. However divided, both sides of the American 39% fight argue in industrial language: Carr cites the scale gap with big tech, shrinking TV news employment and the newspaper industry's extinction path, while Gomez and the opposition weigh concentration's effects on competition, localism and viewpoint diversity. Reach, retransmission fees, the advertising market and journalism investment are the common currency of the argument.

Korea's broadcast policy debate circles a different spot. With every change of government the discussion restarts inside a “normalization” frame, and its high-water mark is the amended Broadcasting Three Acts that took effect in August 2025 — expanding the KBS board from 11 to 15 members and the MBC Foundation and EBS boards from 9 to 13 while diversifying nominating bodies beyond the National Assembly. Yet with the new Broadcasting, Media and Communications Commission slow to form, implementing rules arrived only this May; the first 20 directors were seated on July 6, ten months after the law took effect, in a half-empty launch with 16 National Assembly seats still vacant, and KBS unable even to open its employee and viewer-committee nominations because management refused to convene the editorial committee. From legislation to enforcement decrees to board seating, the entire energy of broadcast policy remains tied up in who controls the boards.

The fight over the all-news channel YTN runs on the same track. The 2024 approval of Eugene Group as YTN's largest shareholder — issued by a two-member commission — was struck down by a Seoul court in November 2025 for procedural illegality; the regulator opened a revocation review this April and, after outside legal counsel, has scheduled hearings with YTN and Eugene Group for July 20. Three years of privatization, annulment litigation and re-publicization fighting, and the question at the center is still not the channel's competitiveness or business model but whose ownership is legitimate.

Meanwhile the language of industrial policy has vanished from the agenda. Korea's limits on conglomerate and newspaper ownership of terrestrial broadcasters, its single-shareholder ceiling and its cross-ownership rules all remain as designed for the early-2000s landscape in which terrestrial TV dominated the market — rules bound to an even older world than the American regulations Nexstar mocked as written “before Netflix streamed a single movie.” Proposals to modernize them are repeatedly crowded out by political combat. The conditions — a shrinking ad market, competition with global platforms — are no different from America's; but while the U.S. debates how to design review standards and procedures to replace a blanket cap, Korea is still litigating the legitimacy of boards and owners.

None of this is an argument for transplanting the American model wholesale. As Trump's license pressure and the NCTA's protest over waiver procedures make clear, case-by-case review without transparent standards can become a channel steering deregulation's benefits to operators friendly to the government of the day. Whether economies of scale actually flow into local journalism investment, or simply into cost-cutting and layoffs, is itself a question industrial logic must build into the review system. That is exactly where Korea's broadcast debate needs to move once it escapes the governance trenches.

Sources

Reuters (David Shepardson), "US agency to vote to end 39% local TV station ownership cap" (July 15, 2026) — https://wkzo.com/2026/07/15/us-agency-to-vote-to-end-39-local-tv-station-ownership-cap/

▷ Base wire story on the FCC vote — Nexstar-Tegna approval and court halt, opposing reactions from Commissioner Gomez and the NAB

CNBC (Reuters wire), "FCC to vote to end local TV station ownership cap" (July 15, 2026) — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/fcc-to-vote-to-end-local-tv-station-ownership-cap.html

▷ CNBC republication of the same Reuters wire story

The Hill, "Lifting 39 percent ownership rule key to local journalism’s future: FCC’s Brendan Carr" (July 15, 2026) — https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5970202-local-tv-news-brendan-carr-fcc-broadcast-cap-hill-nation-summit/

▷ Carr’s Hill Nation Summit conversation — the Aug. 6 vote date, his scale-for-journalism argument, and TV news employment figures

CNN Business, "FCC moves to deliver long-sought win for Trump-aligned broadcasters" (July 15, 2026) — https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/15/media/fcc-carr-trump-broadcasters-sinclair-nexstar

▷ Political context of the case-by-case shift — Free Press’s congressional-limit critique and litigation signal

Variety (Brian Steinberg), "FCC Moves to End Cap on National Broadcast Ownership" (July 15, 2026) — https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/fcc-end-cap-national-broadcast-ownership-1236811655/

▷ Detailed op-ed quotes (100% reach for MS NOW, social media, Netflix), Gomez’s statement, Nexstar’s statement, DIRECTV’s objection, the Kimmel preemption episode

The Hollywood Reporter (Rick Porter), "FCC to Vote on Ending Broadcast Station Ownership Cap" (July 15, 2026) — https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/fcc-vote-broadcast-station-ownership-cap-1236649297/

▷ Carr’s protection-versus-scale line, the reported Sinclair-Scripps talks, and the cap’s practical workarounds (UHF discount, SSAs)

NewscastStudio, "FCC to vote on eliminating national broadcast ownership cap" (July 15, 2026) — https://www.newscaststudio.com/2026/07/15/fcc-to-vote-on-eliminating-national-broadcast-ownership-cap/

▷ Vote announcement and the FCC’s no-automatic-approval statement; Sinclair CEO Ripley’s "common sense" remark; the newspaper-rule analogy

NAB press release, "NAB Applauds Chairman Carr’s Leadership, FCC Movement to Eliminate the Outdated National Cap on Broadcast Television" (July 15, 2026) — https://www.nab.org/documents/newsroom/pressRelease.asp?id=7518

▷ Full statement attributed to NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt

Nielsen, "Sports and Dramas Drive April Viewing Patterns in Nielsen’s Latest Gauge Reports" (June 25, 2026) — https://www.nielsen.com/thegauge

▷ April 2026 Gauge and Media Distributor Gauge data — streaming 47.6%, cable 21.6%, broadcast 19.9%; YouTube No. 1 at 13.4%

Gray Media / E.W. Scripps press release, "Gray Media and Scripps Agree to Swap Television Stations" (July 7, 2025) — https://scripps.com/press-releases/gray-media-and-scripps-agree-to-swap-television-stations/

▷ Original announcement of the five-market cashless swap — station-by-station details, LaPlatney and Symson quotes, waiver requirement

TVNewsCheck (Michael Depp), "Scripps CEO: Station Swap Is An Early Test Of FCC’s Dereg Resolve" (July 7, 2025) — https://tvnewscheck.com/business/article/scripps-ceo-station-swap-is-an-early-test-of-fccs-dereg-resolve/

▷ Symson interview framing the swap as an early test of the FCC’s deregulatory resolve and predicting waiver-based approval

Ted Hearn, Policyband (D.C. Memo), "Gray Media, E.W. Scripps Announce FCC Rule-Breaking TV Station Swaps" (July 8, 2025) — https://substack.com/@policyband

▷ Washington policy newsletter analyzing the swaps as a waiver bet against current top-four rules, with the Greenwood-Greenville precedent

NCTA, filing with the FCC (June 25, 2025) — https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/106250310312730/1

▷ Cable industry filing protesting the transparency of the Greenwood-Greenville waiver approval process

Brendan Carr op-ed, Breitbart, "Restoring Balance to the Broadcast Airwaves" (July 15, 2026) — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/07/15/exclusive-fcc-chairman-brendan-carr-restoring-balance-to-the-broadcast-airwaves/

▷ The chairman’s original op-ed announcing the vote — the 100%-reach list, the newspaper analogy, and the market-balance argument

Journalists Association of Korea (Park Ji-eun), "Half-formed boards: first public broadcaster director appointments under the amended Broadcasting Acts" (July 2026) — http://www.journalist.or.kr/news/article.html?no=61234

▷ First board appointments ten months after the amended Broadcasting Three Acts took effect — 16 National Assembly seats vacant, KBS process stalled

Edaily, "Regulator to hear parties on revoking YTN’s largest-shareholder approval" (July 15, 2026) — https://edaily.co.kr/News/Read?mediaCodeNo=257&newsId=06068006645514848

▷ Progress of the revocation review of Eugene Group’s YTN approval — legal panel issues and the July 20 hearing