The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Federal Communications Commission could relax restrictions on single companies owning multiple media outlets in the same market.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the court’s unanimous opinion, affirmed the FCC’s 2017 move to loosen up its rules after it found that they were “no longer necessary to serve the agency’s public interest goals of competition, localism, and viewpoint diversity.” The decision reversed an appeals court decision that came to the opposite conclusion.
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The court’s decision came after decades of a Republican-led effort to deregulate media ownership. The easement will likely result in a consolidation of many different outlets within media markets.
The case arose after the Prometheus Radio Project argued that the rules would result in a marginalization of viewpoints from women and minorities. Kavanaugh wrote that no evidence had been presented which could prove that assertion.
“The FCC repeatedly asked commenters to submit empirical or statistical studies on the relationship between the ownership rules and minority and female ownership,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Despite those requests, no commenter produced such evidence indicating that changing the rules was likely to harm minority and female ownership.”
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The FCC is required by federal law to update its media ownership rules every four years.
