That was — that guy's hilarious, right? I hope that when I'm celebrating the 30... what did he say? The 37th anniversary of my 39th birthday. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Uh, okay. We're going to keep going. Richard Hudson, no? Oh, that's what Anna was trying to tell me is that we've had a change in order. Oh, good. Well, I hope we don't get — I hope we don't get any FCC violations for this. Brendan Carr is in fact the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and he is going to be talking to — oh, to Julia Manchester. That'll be good. That'll be good. All right, so don't y'all cuss while this is going on, or you'll get in big trouble. Here he comes, Chairman Brendan Carr.
Thank you so much for the warm welcome, Chris. And thank you so much, Chairman Carr, for joining us here today.
Yes, it's good to be with you. Thanks.
Yeah, you know, at The Hill and NewsNation, what we really like is to break news, and we understand that there is some news you have to share and discuss this morning. But before we get started, I just want to put out this disclaimer. The Hill and NewsNation are both owned by Nexstar Media Group. Now, Nexstar Media Group owns over 250 local news stations across the country.
Which are all regulated by the FCC. So, just have to get that out of the way. So, Mr. Chairman, the FCC is announcing a repeal of the nationwide audience cap. Explain the significance of that.
Yes, this is a really interesting one. So, the FCC over the last year and a half or so, we've been working to try to restore balance to the broadcast airwaves. And one thing that's out there is historically, the FCC has tried to strike a balance between national programmers, whether it's Comcast, Disney, Paramount, Fox, or others, and the hundreds of actual local broadcast TV stations that are out there. Many years ago, the FCC put a rule in place that was intended originally to constrain the power of the national programs so we can have a healthy broadcast ecosystem where the local broadcasters that are the ones actually licensed by the FCC with an obligation to serve the public interest can do exactly that. But over the years that regulation, this 39% rule that was meant to constrain the power of the national program has been doing the exact opposite. It's really been holding back local broadcasters from reaching the scale necessary to invest in local news and journalism reporting. If you step back, you know, trust in legacy national news is at an all-time low. I think it's 8% of Americans have a great deal of trust in the legacy media, but local news stations, local reporters that live in communities are still very trusted. And if you want to see that continue, I think we need a change from the status quo, cuz if you step back, the FCC had a similar rule in place that limited investment in local newspapers. And while we had that in place, obviously dramatic changes took place in the news industry. There was an op-ed recently by the editor of the New York Times that said 3,500 newspapers have shuttered in recent years. He said that 80% of local journalism jobs has been lost. So I think if you care about local news, local information, we have to do something other than this trajectory of newsroom shuttering, local news jobs closing. And I think removing this outdated limitation at least gives local journalists a fighting chance.
Right, right. And I would be remiss if I also did not note that this could very much impact Nexstar's acquisition of Tegna. So just for full transparency, putting that out there. Mr. Chairman, you know, critics often point to two things when it comes to you. They talk about every major network except Fox being under FCC investigations and the review of Disney's licenses. You say this is about public interest standards, diversity, equity, and inclusion. But what case do you make against the assertion that this shows a pattern of using FCC licensing authority to reward allies and punish critics?
You know, one thing that we've been doing really across the board goes back to that original framing, which is you can think about the broadcast industry as two main camps. You have the national programs on one hand, which we talked about. There's hundreds of local individual news stations. And for a long time, the FCC, I think, had gotten away from enforcing the public interest standard that's in the Communications Act. And people had treated broadcast just like any other medium, whether it's a cable channel or a podcast or a newspaper. But broadcast TV is really unique among all those other distribution platforms. And the reason is because broadcasters are given a license by the FCC, a monopoly on the airwaves. And in exchange for that, they agreed to meet certain basic public interest obligations. So, we've been pushing hard across the board. Yes, the news media is focused on a lot of the national programmers, but we're taking action on smaller broadcasters that people haven't heard of. A radio station in Mississippi that we weren't convinced was operating fully in the public interest. We did a short renewal there. Gray News, a broadcaster again that most people haven't heard of, called their licenses in for early renewal. So, I think when you look at the complete picture of our actions in broadcast, it shows we've been very consistent about reinvigorating the public interest.
You've been using the term public interest quite a bit, and I've heard you say it before. Talk about what that means to you and when you communicate that language.
Yeah, so thankfully, the FCC has a lot of case law and a lot of decisions describing what the public interest is. In fact, we recently compiled a lot of that case law information and put out a public notice that explains more particularly the public interest. At its core, the idea of the system is you have local news stations in local communities. Their job is to find out what are the needs and interests of this local community and then to serve that with unique programming. I think in too many places the broadcast ecosystem has just become national programming piped in from New York or Hollywood and just brought into local communities in an undifferentiated way. I mean, there's no value add above and beyond, and that's not the broadcast segment. The broadcasters that are doing a great job are ones that are in their community doing local news programming, local TV shows, local interest stories. That's the way the broadcast system was supposed to work, but again it's gotten way out of balance in recent years where there's just too much power coming from New York and Hollywood. And if you're just turning the hundreds and thousands of local TV stations into simply undifferentiated mouthpieces for that national programming, that's not the system that Congress wanted. You can have that. You can go to a virtual cable channel like YouTube TV and you can do that. You can get podcasts. You can get all sorts of national programming lots of ways, but the broadcast ecosystem is supposed to be different, and that's what we're driving towards.
So, what do you say to critics who say, 'Okay, I'm looking at Brendan Carr's agenda, but when a Democratic administration comes in and then there's a new FCC chair, what if they were to flip that precedent on its head and reverse everything you did?' How do you — I mean, do you see that happening? Is that a possibility?
Well, I don't think you have to sort of speculate about a ghost of Christmas future because we've seen the ghost of Christmas past already. There have been Democrats at the FCC and the track record there is very clear. When Democrats were in charge of the FCC, they went down the path of not renewing the license for a local Fox broadcast TV station because of complaints that were raised about content that allegedly ran on the separate Fox News cable channel. In fact, the same group that was pushing that has filed an application with the FCC to get us to renew that enforcement action. You had Democrats in Congress that wrote letters to the FCC urging us to investigate and not renew licenses for Sinclair, which is an owner of local broadcast TV stations, because Democrats thought that Sinclair was too conservative in their viewpoints. Democrat FCC came in and refused to renew hundreds of routine license renewals for Sinclair. You had Democrats in Congress that pushed cable companies expressly to drop Fox News and OAN and Newsmax. They didn't agree with the editorial perspective. The list of actual weaponization by Democrats when they have gavels goes on and on and on. So, there's sort of a fork in the road, I think, for regulators today, which is should we do absolutely nothing and leave the gavel on the ground because Democrats might come in and weaponize it. The truth is they did weaponize it. They're going to weaponize it, but my view is let's at least apply the law as Congress intended. And so, we've been bringing that mindset to the FCC. We're clear-eyed about it. But, it's not just media. The media focus on the media. We're taking a very similar approach all across the work streams that the FCC is doing, whether it's space economy, whether it is on permitting reform, whether it's on national security. We're driving a really aggressive agenda across the whole board.
So, you're — correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're, you know, changing the FCC from within and maybe changing the culture a bit.
Well, look, I've been at the FCC, believe it or not, since 2012 straight. So, over a dozen years at this time, I've had a chance to wear lots of different hats inside the building. I've been a legal advisor to a commissioner. I've been general counsel. In fact, the very first time I walked in the building was as a summer intern all the way back in 2003. So, I spent a lot of time inside the building and I really have a tremendous amount of appreciation for the staff and how talented they are. And being there for so long, that gives you insight, I think, into how to get things done and to accomplish things and motivate the staff. And they've been doing just some great work since we've been there.
Speaking of license renewal, we know that there has been a review of the licenses of Disney stations across the country. Where do you see that going and what's the status of that at that moment? Small note.
Well, we haven't made any decision there at all, one way or the other in terms of either merits or timing. With respect to Disney, there's a couple of different proceedings going on at the FCC. One, back in March of 2025, we started an investigation into Disney after concerns were raised that they may have been discriminating against people based on race and gender or other protected characteristics, which is something that you can't do under the Communications Act and under the FCC's rules. So, we've been going through a lengthy investigation with them there. In the course of that investigation, the team reached the conclusion that Disney was being disingenuous in terms of how it was engaging with the FCC and producing or not producing documents and information. So, we took the next step in our enforcement capabilities, which is we called their licenses in early for early renewal, so they've had to demonstrate that they've been operating in the public interest. Petitions to deny have been filed. Disney has a chance to make its case in response, and we'll simply follow the facts and the record wherever that may go.
