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In 2012, I was a newly minted station group head. One of the first things I was asked to do was to visit Washington and speak with the FCC commissioners. During my decade-long tenure running Graham Media Group, I lost track of the number of times I would make that trek — sometimes representing GMG, sometimes as an Affiliate Network Board Chair or member and sometimes representing the NAB.
In each instance, I would speak to the commissioners about increasing the ownership cap beyond 39%, eliminating the Top 4 rule, which limits how many major stations one owner might own in a single market and of course, my personal favorite, asking for virtual MVPDs (e.g., YouTube TB, Hulu+ Live TV, etc.) to be treated like cable and satellite systems so that broadcasters might fairly negotiate with them for retransmission of their stations’ signals.
While our industry has repeatedly advocated for each of these changes — all critical to the health and viability of local broadcasters — the truth is, to date, our pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Whether the administration was Republican or Democrat, the various commissioners and their chair never seemed to hear what we had to say. Some of them incorrectly assumed we ran our stations and groups according to some sort of network dictate (we most certainly did not) and many simply found the whole local broadcasting business byzantine and uninteresting, especially when compared to the meteoric rise of telecom and Big Tech behemoths that seemed so much