The FCC has lost yet again in court. Over the past two-plus years, Trump’s FCC, headed by former Verizon lawyer and transparent telecom shill Ajit Pai, has tried to do away with all telecom regulations and consumer protections. The big problem Pai and his telecom overlords have had is that, while they are able to present fake evidence for their regulatory rollbacks, they don’t have actual evidence supporting their legal moves. Case in point: Pai’s FCC worked diligently to grease the rails in order to grant right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting more and more monopolistic control over the national media landscape.
In 2017, the Republican-controlled FCC voted to remove a 77-year-old rule requiring localities to maintain a news station, and also tried to roll back a cap that prevented any single broadcasting entity from reaching more than 39 percent of the country, while also doing away with the longstanding rule that no one entity own more than a single broadcasting business. The proposed Sinclair Broadcasting and Tribune Media merger would have broken both of those rules, giving Sinclair more than 70 percent of the national market, and allowing a single entity to own two news/broadcasting outlets.
On Monday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Pai’s FCC “did not adequately consider the effect its sweeping rule changes will have on ownership of broadcast media by women and racial minorities. Although it did ostensibly comply with our prior requirement to consider this issue on remand, its analysis is so insubstantial that we cannot say it provides a reliable foundation for the Commission’s conclusions. Accordingly, we vacate and remand the bulk of its actions in this area over the last three years. In doing so, we decline to grant the requested extraordinary relief of appointing a special master to oversee the FCC’s work on remand.”
The case against Pai and the FCC came from a coalition of unions, consumer, and media advocacy groups. Andrew Schwartzman, a lawyer involved in the lawsuit, called the decision important and told VICE’s Motherboard that "the Court of Appeals has found that the FCC has yet again failed to assess how changing its ownership limits affect people of color and women. Diverse ownership benefits everyone, and rejection of the FCC’s deregulation is a small step in restoring a system that promotes such diversity."
Ironically, Pai actually had to squash the proposed merger between Tribune Media and Sinclair at first, after Sinclair’s dubious accounting became far too problematic to juggle. This setback, however, does not mean Pai and his FCC are done advocating for Sinclair Broadcasting.
Pai and Sinclair will continue to work together to create propaganda—and real evidence and honest reporting will remain the best antidotes. Earlier this year, an appeals court thwarted the FCC’s attempts at throwing 70% of low-income residents off of Lifeline, the government-subsidized internet program. In that decision, the court explained that Pai and his Republican shills did not show any evidence, and gave virtually no thought to how they were destroying a program that they were sworn to uphold. It’s cases like these that have motivated demonic turtle Sen. Mitch McConnell to stack our country’s courts. It ain’t because he cares about the sanctity of life.