The FCC Can’t Save Local News—Only a Free Market Can Kill the Beast

FCC Reform Won’t Fix a Rotten Gameboard

For decades, Americans have watched their local stations, newspapers, and radio shows fade into corporate husks, swallowed by conglomerates and drained of anything resembling independent thought. Why? Because the system rewards it. Centralized power isn’t a bug of federal policy—it’s the inevitable outcome of government interventions that pretend to “level the playing field” while doing the opposite.

Chairman Brendan Carr is right to point out that the 1940s-era cap on national TV ownership—limiting reach to 39% of households—is out of touch. But let’s not kid ourselves. That cap didn’t create the imbalance we see today. It was just one speed bump on a road paved with cheap credit, selective regulation, and government-licensed monopolies.

Monopoly Doesn’t Happen in a Free Market

The very fact that a few corporate players dominate media and tech should tell you something: we do not have a free market. We have a captured market. For over a century, the government—often under the guise of “protecting the public interest”—has handed out privileges, licenses, and sweetheart deals to the biggest players.

You want to know why NBC and YouTube win? It’s not just reach. It’s subsidies, tax breaks, mergers greenlit by antitrust bureaucrats, and an endless stream of regulations that crush small competition while exempting the giants. They have access to capital that local broadcasters can only dream of, and that capital isn’t earned—it’s created. By the Fed. Out of thin air.

So while Carr’s push to remove the ownership cap might help a few local broadcasters compete, it doesn’t touch the root of the problem: we’ve centralized control of capital and policy in a few elite hands.

What We Need Isn’t Deregulation—It’s Disentanglement

Here’s the truth nobody in D.C. wants to say out loud: the only way to restore real balance in the media isn’t by giving broadcasters more leeway to play the same old rigged game—it’s by ending the systems that created the monopolies in the first place.

That means:

• Ending corporate welfare and targeted subsidies.
• Ending the Federal Reserve’s money-printing machine that fuels consolidation.
• Ending regulatory capture, where agencies like the FCC are staffed with former lobbyists for the very industries they’re supposed to oversee.
• And most importantly, getting the federal government out of the business of choosing winners and losers.

If a local broadcaster can survive in a real free market—without needing Washington’s blessing—that’s a win. But propping up local media through modified ownership rules is just rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. If anything, those caps were the least of our problems. The bigger issue is that everything—capital, content, even speech itself—has been commodified and concentrated through decades of state-backed distortion.

The Real Fix Starts at the Root

You can’t fight monopolies by playing their game. You have to dismantle the board they built. That means breaking the incestuous relationship between government, banking, and corporate media. It means encouraging truly independent journalism, funded voluntarily by readers, not through political patronage or hedge fund buyouts.

Brendan Carr might be right to knock down the old barriers. But unless we knock down the newer, invisible ones propped up by bad money and worse policy, the power won’t go back to the people. It’ll just shift from one corporate entity to another.

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