NAB's Kaplan Expects Broadcast-Ownership Relaxation in the Next Year
NAB Chief Legal Officer Rick Kaplan said on an NAB podcast released Monday that he expects a relaxation of FCC broadcast-ownership rules “sometime in the next year or so” and that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and his staff “understand” the problems that broadcasters face. Kaplan predicted that the FCC will relax local radio and TV ownership limits, as well as the national TV ownership cap. “It's the only thing that makes sense. It's in line with what the chairman has talked about repeatedly, both when he was a commissioner and now as chair."
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Those claiming that the FCC lacks authority over the cap are wrong, he said, arguing that when lawmakers established the current 39% ownership cap, they never said the agency wasn’t allowed to alter it again. Statutory language barring the FCC from reviewing the national cap as part of the quadrennial review process doesn’t prevent the commission from tackling it outside that proceeding, Kaplan added, and the law would have explicitly said the FCC is barred from altering the cap if that's what was meant. “Congress isn’t stupid. Congress would have said that,” he argued. “It’s plainly wrong.”