President Trump has called ABC “the worst” and “the most biased network.” Now the FCC is threatening to cancel the broadcast licenses of eight ABC TV stations. ABC says that’s “retaliation.”

Guests

Kelcee Griffis, telecom reporter for Bloomberg News.

Josh Stearns, managing director of programs with the Democracy Fund.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Americans love their local news outlets more than any other form of news media, and it’s by a lot.

More than 75% of Americans say they trust their local news stations and papers. And Pew Research has this remarkable fact. About 80% of Americans say that local news outlets are important to the wellbeing of their communities.

That high percentage cuts across both Republicans and Democrats, all adult age groups, all races, and all educational levels. Think about that. When we say almost all Americans believe in the value of local news, it’s true. What else earns such uniform positive support in this country? Jim Gardner, and anchors just like him across the country, he’s one of the reasons why.

Jim was on TV in the homes of Philadelphians for more than 40 years. His goal always was —

JIM GARDNER: To present a responsible, accurate, thoughtful, and compelling account of the day’s happenings.

CHAKRABARTI: That clip happens to be from Jim’s last night at the anchor desk of 6abc’s Action News at 11. He retired in 2022, and that night he wore a blue pinstripe suit with a mauve and purple diamond pattern tie.

And through the camera, he connected with people across Philly, as he’d done approximately 16,500 times just for the 11 o’clock news.

GARDNER: I came to understand a long time ago that if we want to know what people everywhere are thinking, we can often find out by looking no further than at our own communities, our own school boards and city and town councils, our nonprofit organizations, our law enforcement agencies, business communities, our colleges and universities, our union locals, and houses of worship.

CHAKRABARTI: And Jim viewed that work as pure public service.

GARDNER: In a sense, we made a bargain long ago. We give you our respect and commitment to honest and fair reporting, and you give us your trust. And I can’t help but feel that happens here in a way that is more authentic and even more intimate than anywhere else.

CHAKRABARTI: And with that, Jim Gardner signed off.

This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. Imagine for a moment if 6abc’s Action News signed off entirely, completely, and permanently. No local news TV from this major Philadelphia station. That could happen, because the Federal Communications Commission under President Trump is threatening to pull broadcast licenses for six ABC and seven other ABC local stations.

They’re in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, Fresno, California, and Philadelphia. Now, this conflict has very little to do with the local news and everything to do with the national broadcast of the guy who came on right after the 11:00 news, Jimmy Kimmel, specifically the late night host’s September 15th, 2025 monologue.

JIMMY KIMMEL: We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

CHAKRABARTI: Kirk had been brutally assassinated at a public event on a Utah college campus.

His supporters were dismayed by Kimmel’s jokes. President Trump demanded that ABC fire the comedian. Two days later, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr spoke to conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, and Carr claimed that ABC had violated the public’s trust.

CARR: They have a license granted by us at the FCC, and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s be clear on one thing. ABC, as a national network, has no FCC license. Those licenses go to those local broadcasters, such as the eight local stations I mentioned before, and by the way, those eight stations are owned directly by ABC, and Carr said it was those stations who are in his sights.

CARR: Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

CHAKRABARTI: Shortly thereafter, Carr ordered an unscheduled early review of the broadcast licenses for those eight local stations.

By the way, ABC is owned by the Disney Company, and the FCC claimed it’s investigating the stations for possible unlawful discrimination based on Disney ABC’s DEI policies. There’s nothing in the review that mentions Kimmel or Charlie Kirk. Nevertheless, free speech and freedom of the press advocates are calling on the FCC’s timing, and they’re saying it’s stunning that the review doesn’t have to explicitly mention Kimmel’s joke to know what this is really all about.

Even former FCC chairmen are stunned.

MARK FOWLER: It’s just shocking. It’s unheard of. It’s unprecedented.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Mark Fowler. He ran the FCC in the Reagan administration, and we’ll hear more from him later. So is the government threatening to take local news off the air because of a joke? If so, what does such an unprecedented use of federal power signify for the first and fundamental freedoms in the Bill of Rights?

Let’s start with Kelcee Griffis. She’s a telecom reporter for Bloomberg News, and she’s been covering Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, since 2017. Kelcee, welcome back to On Point.

KELCEE GRIFFIS: Thanks for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so before we get to the language of the actual FCC review, I think we should go over a little bit of the history of how we got here. Because every month seems like a decade these days.

So just after the President of the United States called for Jimmy Kimmel’s firing what happened right after that?

GRIFFIS: So we saw a couple things happen. The first was this response that we didn’t expect of these local station group owners deciding, you know what? The president is upset about this.

We maybe don’t think that this was in great taste, so we are going to pull Kimmel off of our broadcasts. And that’s a pretty unusual step for these ABC affiliates. These stations are paying a lot of money to be able to affiliate themselves with ABC and carry that national content, so you don’t often see them deciding to omit one of these national programs from their lineups.

CHAKRABARTI: … Was it these specific eight stations, or remind me, was it other ABC affiliates?

GRIFFIS: Yes, this was other ABC affiliates. Thanks for asking for that clarification. They were owned by Sinclair and Nexstar, two national programming, or sorry, two national station outlet ownership groups.

This does not affect the ABC stations yet, but that’s the history of how this got started. So ABC then, after seeing that response, decides to pull Kimmel off of the air for about a week. He’s suspended. He comes back to the air about a week later to record ratings. And from there, we more or less moved on, but we still knew that Carr had his sights set on ABC and Disney.

So he actually pretty conveniently had a letter of investigation out to ABC back in March 2025 that put them on notice that he wasn’t happy about some of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the way they’d been running their business in, 2020 and going forward from there.

So he sat on this letter for over a year, but after Kimmel made some more comments in April, within days he pulled the trigger on that letter basically saying, “We’ve had this investigation out there. I am still concerned that you are not behaving in a way or dropping your DEI programs in a way that is consistent with this administration.

We’re going to ask you to defend your licenses orally.”

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So now we get into sort of the weeds on licensure and the FCC. Because what is specifically, what is Brendan Carr and the FCC saying about Disney/ABC’s DEI practices that he believes runs afoul of the mandates that stations have to follow in order to retain their licenses?

GRIFFIS: First of all, you were exactly right to point out that this has nothing, at least on paper, to do with Kimmel or with late night comedy or with any of the issues that ABC has most been in the news for in recent weeks, in the last year. What Carr says is that Disney has run a, quote, “racially segregated affinity groups and spaces.”

They had inclusion standards that he thinks are discriminatory. They required 50% or more of writers, directors, and crew to be selected from based on certain group identities. These were all things that he outlined in March 2025. Since then, Disney engaged with the FCC, exchanging hundreds of pages of documents, and Carr said he was still not satisfied with the answers that he had gotten from ABC.

He felt like they were playing, quote, “rope-a-dope.” He thought they were not being transparent. They were trying to wiggle out of this investigation, and that was when he said, “Look, we’re gonna pull your licenses for early review. We’re not gonna let you wiggle out of this. We are going to take sort of a full accounting for this investigation.”

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Kelsey. We have a clip from FCC chair, Brendan Carr, himself. This was at a press conference earlier this year and he mentioned that he had reached out to Disney to, as you said, alert them to the FCC’s concerns about these DEI practices, and Carr says he did it before Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue.

CARR: In March of last year, where I wrote a letter to Disney saying that there was evidence, and Disney has the opportunity, will continue to have the opportunity to put in counter-evidence, but there was evidence or allegations indicating that Disney through this sort of invidious form of DEI discrimination, was creating, as I specify in the letter to them, racially segregated spaces inside the company.

There’s other allegations that went to Disney forcing racial and identity quotas or preferences, and I said at the time that if that pans out, that’s a big deal.

CHAKRABARTI: So Kelsey, this phrase, invidious form of DEI discrimination. Now technically, invidious can mean anything from unpleasant or objectionable to a kind of harm or resentment, but it’s a very particular- phrase from Carr.

What does he mean?

GRIFFIS: This is a phrase that I’ve only heard Brendan Carr use to describe this behavior of companies that we’ve seen, especially since 2020. He has consistently used that word and basically just said, “I don’t think these companies are behaving in the public interest.” And the public interest is the key phrase on which a licensing investigation can hinge.

So he’s tying those two concepts together.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Kelcee, I just want to play a couple more clips from Brendan Carr, and then we’ll pick up with what you were saying.

It’s just these clips seem to really tie in quite well with your analysis. So here’s Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, in May of this year, and he was on CNBC.

CARR: We went through a period of time around 2020 where a lot of corporate America went all in on this invidious form of discrimination.

We’ll see if Disney was one of them. But we’ve had multiple rounds of subpoenas with Disney, they’re producing documents, and Disney will have every opportunity to make its case, but there has been evidence coming to light that aligns with a legal memo DOJ put out last year for private companies that you can’t hire and promote based on race and gender.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that was Brendan Carr in May of this year. And he also said that maybe it’s not just their concerns over DEI hiring practices that the FCC has its eye on. He says there are multiple concerns.

CARR: We’ve been very clear that we’re holding broadcasters accountable to their obligations, not just public interest standards, but EEO obligations.

The FCC has rules on the books. You can’t discriminate based on race and gender, and there’s evidence that had been submitted that’s what Disney was doing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Kelcee, I really want us to take a very sort of bright light to this issue because language and federal notices can be very thick and opaque.

But bottom line here, this issue of having to, that broadcasters have to serve, quote, “The public interest, convenience, and necessity,” that is language that dates, what, to the 1930s? Because back then the airwaves or forms of communication over the airwaves were so rare that broadcasters were held to a higher standard in terms of they had to have earned the public’s trust in order to maintain their license.

I think that’s kind of gone without saying for what? A century now. But how, again, is Brendan Carr tying that sort of universally approved standard with DEI hiring and workplace practices?

GRIFFIS: So Carr has been really consistent in reminding us that the broadcasters get to use the public airwaves for free in exchange for using those airwaves to serve the public interest.

But we’ve never seen a definition of the public interest. I think maybe in decades prior it was a little bit easier for us all to agree on what serving the public and the public interest looked like. But now I think the media environment has become so fragmented that depending on maybe what your political leanings are, you will view serving the public interest from a different light.

So that’s a little bit of what’s going on here. I did have sources telling me that what Disney’s behavior looked like in the last few years was really no different than what any other company in corporate America was doing to try to make their operations more responsive to different viewpoints and more inclusive.

It’s also worth noting that there is a similar letter out to Comcast that Carr actually sent first, and of course, Comcast is the owner of the NBC network, and we haven’t seen similar investigations into NBC yet. All of those things have led folks to say, “We don’t really think that this is about DEI. We think this is more about some kind of animus against Disney.” That’s the inside perspective.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Interesting. And by the way, to your point, in one of the clips we just played of Carr, he himself said around 2020, a lot of corporate America, actually he called this, called it again this invidious form of discrimination, but it was, as you were saying, another way of viewing it is attempts to make workplaces more diverse and welcoming.

So he himself says it’s not just ABC, but they are focusing on ABC. Okay. One more, one more part of this puzzle here and it has to do with The View, Kelcee? Why?

GRIFFIS: Yes. I feel like a lot of us maybe haven’t thought about The View beyond having it on in the background or seeing a guest that is maybe of interest.

JD Vance recently went on The View to talk about his new book, and he had record ratings. Yes, this has maybe some more, some new cultural relevance recently. This show is in Carr’s sights specifically because he says it’s not a news show. It’s actually a talk show. And if you are a talk show, you have to offer candidates equal time when opposing candidates equal time when they appear on your show.

This happened a few months ago when The View was trying to have James Talarico, a candidate out of Texas, on the show, and they ultimately decided not to because Carr put the show on notice that if you have one candidate in a race on the show, you’re going to have to offer some sort of time to the opposing candidate.

And that’s something that he’s been trying to hold the show more accountable for. I think a lot of folks see this as kind of wrapping into the larger Disney investigation, putting Disney on notice that the FCC and the Trump administration more broadly is taking a really close look at what they’re putting on those airwaves.

Okay. This is so fascinating, Kelcee. Quite frankly, the arcana of federal regulation, it just, I will never stop finding it interesting. So here is Brendan Carr once again talking about why he has concerns regarding The View.

CARR: Even if The View is not a bona fide news program, we haven’t decided that yet, that wouldn’t dictate that they have to have any particular candidate on the show.

Rather, the rule just means that the TV station has to provide comparable time and placements. They would still retain discretion even if the FCC were to rule against them.

CHAKRABARTI: So equal time. That’s what Brendan Carr’s talking about, except that he’s wrong. There is no Fairness Doctrine with the FCC anymore.

And you know how we know that? We talked to the guy who undid the Fairness Doctrine. His name is Mark Fowler. He spent more time at the FCC as chair than anyone else. He served under the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1987, and his signature effort was to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 FCC rule that required licensed broadcasters to present contrasting views on controversial public issues.

Now, after a long court and congressional battle, the Reagan FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, citing its belief that the mandate violated freedom of speech. So when Brendan Carr says that broadcasters have to, as he said, provide different points of view, he’s simply wrong. As of 1987, they do not.

Now, Mark Fowler has deep Republican roots. He not only chaired the FCC under Ronald Reagan, he also served on Reagan’s campaign staff … in 1976 and 1980, both those campaigns, and more recently, he contributed to President Trump’s campaign. But as you heard at the very top of the show, Mark Fowler is outraged at Brendan Carr, the current FCC chair’s move to threaten local stations.

MARK FOWLER: No FCC has ever done that. Disney should win this because this is just totally unconstitutional. He’s attempting to use the regulatory system to try to shut down someone who broadcasts content that apparently his president, President Trump, doesn’t like.

CHAKRABARTI: Fowler and at least three other former FCC chairs under both Republican and Democratic administrations recently wrote a scathing letter to Carr saying, quote, “Through this proceeding, the FCC seeks to censor Disney’s and ABC’s speech and send a chilling message to all broadcasters, ‘Carry speech we don’t like at your peril.’

FOWLER: The First Amendment doesn’t care how critical a speaker is of another speaker or politician. It’s designed to let people speak, to broadcast, to print as they see fit. That’s the genius of our First Amendment. And because Disney exercises editorial discretion in determining what it broadcasts on its stations, and it was complained about by the White House, and almost instantly, the chairman of the FCC says, “I’m designating all eight licenses of Disney on some specious grounds for renewal of their license.”

CHAKRABARTI: And Mark Fowler tells us that he believes there’s no room for misinterpreting the Constitution in this matter. He says, following the First Amendment used to be at the heart of how FCC chairman, including another of his fellows, Dennis Patrick, viewed their job.

FOWLER: First Amendment is incredibly clear. In plain language, it says that the government shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press.

And Dennis and I felt, as President Reagan did, that no means no, and that means the FCC as well as any other party can’t impinge upon that First Amendment freedom. So for us, that was a big deal because people thought that the FCC could, in the public interest, censor or regulate speech. And we said, “No, you can’t do that.”

Doesn’t matter how fair or unfair they are, the First Amendment gives people the right to say as they please, even if they’re unfair.

CHAKRABARTI: Basically, what Fowler is saying is that it’s his belief in the First Amendment and the prohibition of the government being able to regulate in any way, shape, or form speech by the press, that is the logic that he used to do away with the fairness doctrine.

And he says now that regardless of how the FCC rules on the ABC license issues, there could be a long court battle ahead, and he believes that the FCC would likely lose.

But if the commission should prevail, he believes the outcome could be very dire.

FOWLER: It would make every licensee think that they are susceptible to having their license taken away.

That’s just taking not just their ability to speak away, but it’s taking away the property, the valuable property, the investments they’ve made. It is confiscation. So that would be the effect of it. It would be an earthquake. The sad thing is it would be caused by someone who acts more like a political hitman because he’s in sync with his president and what his president thinks or doesn’t think about content that he hears.

So that would be not just unfortunate, it would be a disaster for our country. It would mean that all freedom of speech is at risk by government action.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Mark Fowler. He served as the chairman of the FCC for six years in the Reagan administration. I’d like to bring Josh Stearns into the conversation now.

He’s managing director of programs at Democracy Fund. Josh, welcome to you.

JOSH STEARNS: Hi, Meghna. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So Mark Fowler there presented kind of almost a cataclysmic view of what could happen if the FCC goes forward and does not renew the licenses of these eight local stations.

Do you share that dark an outlook?

STEARNS: I think it’s really troubling, and it really goes to the core of what America is about. We were founded on the idea of self-governance by an informed citizenry, so the founders protected journalism and the First Amendment. They even subsidized the distribution of newspapers because they cared so deeply about making sure that people could have access to a variety of viewpoints and news and information about their communities. Because that was key to people governing their nation.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me more then, because what I’m not clear on is have we ever in the past, and Kelcee, I’ll also hear from you on this, but let me start with Josh, has the FCC gone so far as to say we’re going to review your licenses because of hiring practices it does not like?

For things that superficially might be by the book, but are more substantially about speech?

STEARNS: Yeah, we should not be distracted by the idea that this is about diversity or even the public interest. This is clearly about going after people who are seen as critics or whose reporting an administration doesn’t like.

The chairman likes to cite the public interest, which Kelcee did a really good job of explaining, and that there’s never been a sort of statutory definition of public interest. But if you look historically, it’s always been understood as encouraging media diversity, localism, and competition, and this administration has taken a range of actions that actually go against the public interest.

It’s attacked and defunded public broadcasting. It has waived its own laws to approve two giant television companies, Nexstar and Tegna, to let them join up and have 265 stations across 44 states owned by one company, and has just given the green light to Paramount and Warner Brothers. So we see all of this consolidation and attacks on journalistic independence as going fully against the public interest.

CHAKRABARTI: Kelcee, do you want to comment on that?

GRIFFIS: Yeah, I think it’s worth noting that we have seen the FCC in decades past, it’s been several decades, review licenses over things like business fraud or hoaxes that were knowingly perpetrated on the air as a stunt. Think Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds sort of thing.

What my sources are saying, though, is that this type of review ostensibly, whether it is over content or whether it’s over business practices, is unprecedented to the point that we don’t even really know how this is going to play out within the FCC. The timeline, the sort of legal process for doing so, this is all getting us into a bit of uncharted territory.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so thank you for that clarification, because I think it’s really important. So the FCC has indeed either revoked or at least reviewed licenses multiple times in the past in cases of overt criminal activity, right? You mentioned fraud.

GRIFFIS: That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, and this is different because there’s nothing overtly criminal, as far as I can tell, the, other than a case-by-case basis about DEI practices.

GRIFFIS: Yes. I believe and sources have told me the first time that we’ve really seen the FCC get involved in the business practices that are usually at the discretion of these private companies. Now, Carr says he believes he has these federal grounds for doing so that fall under the FCC’s purview of regulating these broadcast companies.

But I think a lot of my sources are saying that is a big stretch. Now, to be clear, I suppose I should have asked this question a lot earlier. Kelcee, let me just stick with you for a second here. If the FCC goes through with, completes this review and says it believes that these eight ABC stations are in violation of the public interest, could it actually revoke their broadcast licenses?

And would that mean more than losing the local news on those stations?

GRIFFIS: Yes. The FCC could ultimately say, “ABC, you can’t control these licenses anymore.” You’re right, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the stations will immediately go dark, but it does represent a pretty big threat to Disney’s influence over this media ecosystem.

I think it is worth noting that the licenses are not necessarily the biggest part of Disney’s business model financially. They have parks, they have the movie studios, they have that national affiliate content, but the stations really speak directly to Americans in their hometowns, and that is something that still has a lot of cultural cache, and that’s something that I think Disney definitely doesn’t want to lose.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s once again hear from the current FCC chair, Brendan Carr.

Less than a month ago, he was interviewed by POLITICO, where he asserted that the administration was actually acting in the best interests of stations. Here’s what he said.

CARR: The entire idea of broadcast was that you wanted local TV stations to push back on the national programmers, to have some give and take.

We have rules, in fact, that regulate what we call preemption. So if a national programmer wants to run a particular show or doesn’t wanna run particular programming, the local TV station has the right to preempt and to push back and make a different decision. And so all of these decisions ultimately go to what we’re called upon to do by the Communications Act, which is to assess whether they have been operating in the public interest or not.

CHAKRABARTI: Josh Stearns, do you buy that explanation from Carr?

STEARNS: I appreciate that Carr wants to focus on localism, and I wish that he had thought more about that before approving the mergers that he’s approved, which are removing localism and nationalizing big pieces of our media. We’ve seen with these companies like Nexstar a willingness to buy up a bunch of television stations and then put the exact same reporting on all of them, literally the same scripts, sometimes the same anchors with different logos on them.

That is not localism. And so what I’d really love to see is to have Brendan Carr and the FCC really take a look at how do we enable and empower local voices and to listen to local people. As you said at the top of the show, Americans love and trust their local news. They believe across political ideologies that local news is important to their wellbeing.

And so it seems to me that based on that, and based on the hundreds of thousands of comments that have gone into the FCC about these actions that they’ve taken, the public is saying, “Don’t touch our local news.”

CHAKRABARTI: In fact, we’ve got some of the comments right here. Here’s Deborah Hoffman.

She left a public comment on this. She said, “The View is a bona fide news program. The very aim and end of our institutions is just this, that we may think what we like and say what we think.” And then on the local news front someone named D. Green told the FCC, this is about Philly, “6abc Philadelphia is a trusted source of local news and removal should not even be a consideration.”

Here’s another one from a fellow named Andrew. “I support 6abc to be on the air just like any news station. The government should not control my choices. Please renew their license.” It goes on.

Kelcee, as Josh said, I think there are, what, tens of thousands of comments that the public has made to the FCC about this?

GRIFFIS: There was so much engagement in this FCC comment period. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this since net neutrality was first being discussed like back in 2017 or 2016. I think yes, we have seen so much outpouring of support from the public for this, like you’re saying, most of them in support of keeping these ABC local stations on the air.

But it’s interesting that at the FCC, the review of the licenses is still focused on these DEI like national corporate policies. So I think there is a little bit of maybe a disconnect between what the public is weighing in on and what Carr says he’s actually looking at.

CHAKRABARTI: Wondering if it’s because the public sees through what Brendan Carr is trying to do. But Kelcee, let me go back to something you said earlier, and forgive me for being a little bit gauche here, but to be clear, again, you said that these stations, if the FCC decided to revoke or not renew their licenses, that it wouldn’t necessarily mean that they went off the air?

GRIFFIS: Yes. That part is still, I’ll be honest, a little bit unclear to me. Because like we were saying, we’re in a bit of uncharted territory. And this is still something that’s going to play out over a couple of years. The FCC still has internal processes it needs to run. There could be some sort of internal judicial review if Carr decides to continue escalating this.

This will almost certainly be appealed to federal court. So this very well could run into the next administration whoever that might be, before we see any sort of resolution.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So while the threat is being made or the review is going forward, we don’t know what could happen. Okay. So Josh, let me go back to you.

You were talking more about the importance of local news. I think we have seen beyond this FCC v. ABC story, you’ve said this, we’ve actually seen consolidation of ownership of local stations go apace in the past couple years. A lot of people have noticed that there are times in which, amongst the Sinclair stations, for example, where anchors will be reading literally the same text no matter what part of the country we’re in.

So local television news has been feeling a lot of pressure to eliminate the localism for some time.

STEARNS: Yeah, we have seen that, and yet there has been incredible public service provided by these stations, and some of the most innovative and exciting things that are happening are where these stations are partnering with nonprofit local news organizations in their communities who are helping build back that powerful local reporting voice and accountability.

And so what we’re seeing is a moment of profound change in local news. Just since 2005, 3,500 newspapers have closed around the country, and now with social media algorithms, online scams, AI summaries, it’s harder and harder for people to find trustworthy information. And so what we need to think, be thinking about is how are folks going to do that thing that our founders wanted, that self-governance by an informed citizenry?

There’s a lot of research on this that says when local news declines and when consolidation happens, fewer people vote, fewer people run for office, polarization gets worse, and even companies pollute more and governments waste more money because no one’s keeping an eye on them. So this has real impact on people’s daily lives.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I’m glad that you mentioned newspapers because we’ve been focusing on broadcast television right now, but there has been a total decimation of local newspapers going on for many years now. And with that truth, it’s actually, I would say, in a sense, made local TV news and radio, props for my fellow audio people, but that much more important.

But even there though, Josh, I was looking at some numbers from Pew Research. They have a local news fact sheet. Pew has found in the last 10 years alone, the percent of U.S. adults who say that they follow local news very closely has declined. They may trust it, but the amount of people who actually follow it closely has declined from 37% to roughly 21%, and that they’re less engaged with local news that is still there than they were before.

STEARNS: Yeah, you have to ask a question of whether they are less engaged because they’re less interested or less engaged because it’s getting harder and harder to find their way to it because social media platforms have deprioritized it and other factors like that. The fact that there’s still trust there makes me feel like part of what we’re seeing is that, I personally am really glad that there’s a camera in every one of my town meetings.

But I may not go watch all six hours of that town meeting. And so I think that there’s a role that journalism plays that people really trust and want to support that goes beyond what they’re turning on every night on the nightly news.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Kelcee, back to this ownership question. I understand that there have been recent changes made by the FCC that could have an impact on who owns how much of, or how many news outlets in any one market.

Can you tell me about that?

GRIFFIS: Yes. Last week, the FCC, under Brendan Carr’s direction, voted along party lines to get rid of this national viewership cap. It was a rule that dates back to at least the ’90s, basically saying no more than 39% of U.S. households can be reached by a single broadcaster. That pretty much ensured that there would be what the FCC saw as this diversity of voices on the airwaves.

No one corporate perspective could dominate. Now, this kind of opens the door for these larger broadcasting groups to reach bigger swaths of the country. We’ve already seen that Nexstar and Tegna are trying to merge. That merger is on hold right now because the federal courts are scrutinizing it, but if this merger is ultimately allowed to go forward, they will be able to reach 80% of U.S. households.

So we’re seeing these kind of bigger and bigger swaths of the country reached by the same broadcasters.

CHAKRABARTI: Josh, what do you think about that?

STEARNS: I think one thing that’s really important to note is that Kelcee mentioned that these, this merger, as well as the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger are on hold, and that one of the reasons that they are on hold is because people have spoken out.

I think it’s very easy to consider this as a battle between big companies and big government, but at the end of the day, this really affects people’s lives, and it’s been amazing to see how people have called on their state attorney generals and others to take action on this. And so in both cases, the Tegna merger that Kelcee just mentioned, the Paramount-Warner Brothers mergers, state attorney generals have put their foot down and said, “This is going to harm our communities and our consumers and our competition, and we need to take a hard look at this.”

CHAKRABARTI: It’s interesting, Josh. Suddenly occurred to me that Brendan Carr and President Trump himself might say, no, this is not a battle between big companies and big government. We’re fine with big companies, as long as they say what we want them to say, right? Because Disney is a huge company.

It is massive. Global behemoth, in fact, but its bigness isn’t enough for the FCC to say do what you want, because they’re not doing, or Disney-ABC isn’t doing exclusively what the administration wants. And actually, Kelcee, that turns me back to Brendan Carr himself. Now did some or maybe a lot of people see him as a very much sort of by the book kind of regulator?

And because this isn’t necessarily, this action against ABC is not necessarily by the book.

GRIFFIS: I think the last time we spoke for On Point, Carr was just coming into or just nominated to be FCC chair in the new Trump administration. And at that time, he was seen as this longtime FCC insider, someone who was going to play by the books, someone who was general counsel at the FCC, so he really knew how to run a tight ship.

Since then, we have seen that he has been actually willing to use that inside knowledge to find some of these legal gray areas and use them in a creative way to accomplish these administration’s goals.

CHAKRABARTI: Was that entirely unforeseen? Because it seems like it’s a common, it’s a common occurrence between, for people who end up working for President Trump.

GRIFFIS: I think it was a bit surprising because Carr is such a creature of the FCC. He came up professionally in this institution, and for a lot of people who on both sides of the aisle, who have followed this agency for so long, I do think they were surprised at some of the lengths he’s been willing to go including doing things like calling up licenses for early review on the grounds that he’s using.

These are things that we have never seen before and that people didn’t know to expect.

CHAKRABARTI: Josh Stearns, let me ask you, one thing that Mark Fowler told us, we heard from him a little bit earlier in the show, is he was pretty much saying that in a sense, no matter what happens with this current action the FCC is taking, he thinks if it ends up in the courts, he believes the FCC would probably lose.

But I do wonder if there’s already, the horse has left the barn in terms of a potential chilling effect. You don’t have to be Disney or ABC, maybe you’re just a local broadcaster who still, who may now be looking over their shoulder in terms of, we have a punitive FCC that might be willing to review our licenses if we somehow run afoul of the administration.”

Or is that, am I fearmongering too much?

STEARNS: No, I think that chilling effect is absolutely a possible outcome, and actually the intent of this. As you mentioned, it’s not just about big companies and big government, it is about a government who wants companies to act a certain way, whether those companies are law firms or media companies, or honestly, whether they are nonprofit organizations or schools or universities.

We’ve seen the same tactics at play across these types of organizations, and it’s about trying to bring people in line with the administration’s point of view. And so we have already seen, companies, especially those that have business transactions like mergers in front of this administration, bend over backwards to try to please the administration and to put people in place via hiring and other decisions that will make sure that the administration sees what they want to see in that kind of reporting, and that is very problematic.

And I think you have to pair that with the legal attacks that this administration has taken against individual journalists and their sources as well to see the full picture of First Amendment threats that are mounting like storm clouds on the horizon.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.