Gomez Wants Public Interest Defined, Market-Based Ownership Rule Relaxation
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez signaled that she's open to relaxing some broadcast-ownership rules, called for a clearly defined public interest standard, and again condemned FCC “censorship and control” efforts in her latest “First Amendment Tour” speech Thursday evening. “While one set of outlets is defunded, stripped of licenses or publicly admonished, others are quietly promoted and cleared of regulatory obstacles,” Gomez told a modest crowd at the University of Mississippi. The Trump administration’s goal “is not to reduce bias or to ensure balance, but to engineer a media environment that echoes the government's worldview.”
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The lack of a clear definition of the FCC’s public interest standard for broadcasters facilitates the agency’s recent pressure campaign against broadcast networks, Gomez said. “I have called for the commission to initiate a rulemaking to define what it means by the public interest, because otherwise we're just regulating against what we don't like, and that is a direct violation of the First Amendment.” Asked how she thinks the public interest standard should be defined, she replied, “I'll tell you what I would not want it to look like. It would not be: You cannot report the news the way that the FCC doesn't like it or the administration doesn't like it.”
Gomez has called for such a proceeding before, including at Tuesday’s FCC meeting. Chairman Brendan Carr also said at that meeting that the agency could one day open a proceeding on clarifying the public interest standard, though he added that he's “not sure it’s necessary.” In a CNBC interview in December, shortly before he became chairman, Carr said it was “probably appropriate” for the FCC to open a proceeding on defining the public interest standard. “I don’t want to be the speech police,” he also said then.
New Street analyst Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff, said in a note to subscribers last month that he doubts Carr will ever hold a proceeding defining the public interest. “Clarifying the definition would make it challenging to apply a viewpoint diversity finding to justify revoking the broadcast licenses of [Disney] or [Comcast] without opening the door to doing the same to Sinclair and Nexstar.”
Gomez said Thursday that the FCC received thousands of complaints after Jimmy Kimmel Live! was temporarily taken off the air by ABC, Nexstar and Sinclair, and she herself received numerous physical letters condemning Carr’s actions. “People are actually pulling out a piece of paper, writing on a piece of paper, putting it in an envelope and stamping it on this issue.”
The public pushback is what led to Kimmel's return, Gomez said, and she was “heartened” by how much of it was bipartisan. She said she expects that further FCC pressure efforts are likely to come. “We will also likely see further efforts to dismantle barriers to entry for media that is seen as favorable to this administration.” That could include pushing for broadcast consolidation, “imposing new rules on virtual cable providers or steering the next wave of broadcasting technology” in a manner that benefits media favorable to the Trump administration.
Gomez indicated that she’s open to relaxing some broadcast rules in the FCC’s quadrennial review proceeding but suggested that the matter be evaluated market by market. “I do think that we need to look at how much we control the rules against [broadcast] consolidation on a market-by-market basis, because we have to acknowledge that some broadcast stations are suffering from difficult economic times.” Broadcasters have widely called for a total elimination of broadcast-ownership limits and would likely object to market-based rules.
Gomez’s support for relaxing some ownership regulations appears to be a policy shift. She voted to approve the FCC’s last quadrennial review order in December 2023, which didn’t relax ownership limits.
On the national ownership cap, Gomez added that the FCC lacks the authority to waive the 39% audience reach limit. “I'm trying to balance keeping a diversity of viewpoints while at the same time understanding that we need to help these broadcasters survive in this new environment that they find themselves."