Bookending the Christmas weekend, the FCC’s long-awaited 2018 Quadrennial Review Report and Order was adopted on Friday, December 22 and released Tuesday, December 26. The Commission is required by Congress to conduct a regulatory review of its broadcast ownership rules every four years and was directed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to conclude this particular review no later than December 27 (or to show cause why that couldn’t be done).
A gift for some and lump of coal for others, the FCC declined to read a deregulatory presumption into its statutory mandate and largely concluded that the existing rules remained necessary in the public interest. The Dual Network Rule and Local Radio Ownership Rule remain unchanged, with the FCC modifying the latter only to make permanent the “interim” contour-overlap methodology that has been used for decades to determine ownership limits in areas outside of defined Nielsen Audio Metro markets and in Puerto Rico.
The real changes were contained in the FCC’s modification of the Local Television Ownership Rule’s “Top-Four Prohibition,” which restricts a broadcaster from acquiring a second station in a market if it would result in the broadcaster owning two of the market’s top-four-rated stations. First, the FCC adjusted the methodology used to determine whether a station is ranked among the top-four stations in a market by (a) adopting a “Sunday to Saturday, 7 am to 1 am” daypart, (b) requiring data from the 12-month period preceding the date of the application, and (c) requiring aggregation of the audience share of all free-to-consumer non-simulcast multicast programming airing on streams owned by the station(s) at issue.
Second, resisting calls from the broadcast industry to loosen or eliminate the Top-Four Prohibition due to increased competition in the media marketplace, the FCC instead expanded the rule to reach multicast streams and LPTV stations that had, until now, been outside the purview of the ownership limits.