How we lost broadcast television

Disney suing the FCC to protect its own freedom of speech is a great move in the right direction, but it also still feels like too little too late.

By Alex Cranz | August 21, 2026 | 9:00am

TV Features Disney

This week, Disney finally said enough is enough and sued the FCC for infringing on the company’s First Amendment rights and constantly threatening the handful of broadcast licenses it still holds. The lawsuit has been a long time coming. It was the lone Democrat still on the FCC board who praised the media company. “Disney has found its courage,” FCC commissioner Anna Gomez said in a statement. “It’s good for the First Amendment. It’s good for the public, and it’s good for broadcasters in general.”

And Gomez is right—a company as big as Disney willing to go toe to toe with a federal government deep in the throes of fascism and working hard to silence all critics is a good thing! The public needs it and other broadcasters need to see that fighting is better than placating. Yet the move by Disney is also about as performative as Brendan Carr’s theatrics have been. “The press could in no way be described as free,” Disney wrote in its complaint. But when it comes to broadcast TV and a free press, the battle was lost long before Disney filed its lawsuit.

For three generations, broadcast TV was the epicenter of American culture. Millions tuned in to Lucy Ricardo having a baby, Hawkeye leaving the M.A.S.H. unit, and Meredith Grey watching a man explode. Broadcast flourished because of an understanding between station owners and the U.S. government. The government contended that all Americans owned the rights to the radio waves, and only licensed TV stations to broadcast if they agreed to certain rules. It led to decades of TV that did a great job of appealing to broad audiences but a terrible job at appealing to niche ones, during which national news was produced by the big networks and local news by the stations. Cable then chipped away at broadcast’s hegemony by offering more niche entertainment and 24/7 news before streaming began to dominate by offering near-infinite entertainment, and younger people turned to social media to be informed.

Those shifts had knock-on effects. The big networks, who made their money broadcasting via stations they owned or were affiliated with, needed new revenue and turned to streaming media. As Fox, Disney, NBC Universal, and Paramount shifted their focus, a small cabal of companies pounced—buying up stations across the U.S. and then using their newfound monopoly to bend the conversation in local news to their will. Thirty percent of all broadcast stations in the U.S. are owned by just two companies: Nexstar, which owns more than 250 stations (more on that in a moment), and Sinclair which owns 177. Sinclair became notorious following this haunting video of all of its newscasters using the exact same script and Nexstar is familiar to news nerds for its right-leaning NewsNation cable news channel. The equal air time rules that governed broadcast for decades were technically still being applied, but at the local level these stations began exerting new political pressure.

After Jimmy Kimmel commented on the death of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, Sinclair and Nexstar both pulled the show on their ABC affiliates. Kimmel was back on air a week later, and it’s easy to say Sinclair and Nexstar lost—but so did the millions of people in the broadcast range of those stations. And with Nexstar trying to merge with fellow cabal member Tegna, there’s a very real chance the next politically motivated blackout could be much much worse.

Tegna only owns 60 stations, but when combined with Nexstar, they would reach more than 80 percent of all Americans. That’s not supposed to be possible. No company can have a reach of more than 39 percent of Americans. There are plenty of loopholes to get around that, but Nexstar has been banking on its friendly relationship with Trump, who endorsed the deal personally, to get around the rule. Eight state attorneys general (guess which political party) and DirectTV filed an antitrust suit to halt the merger. It’s now on hold while the case moves through the court system, so the worst possible case for free and public airwaves might still be stopped. However, even without Tegna, Nexstar remains the largest owner of broadcast TV stations in the United States.

You could argue that’s not a problem since only 34 percent of Americans prefer to get their news via television, but 64 percent of Americans actually get their news from TV. That percentage climbs as the audience gets older, to the point that 87 percent of Americans over the age of 65 get their news from TV. That’s a lot of older voters getting their news from two very conservative companies.

Nexstar and Sinclair only got this far in their efforts because most of us didn’t care. We have streaming, which we have to pay for and can’t (legally) record, but it’s where we get to watch whatever we want when we want and we can even pay to avoid all commercials. We have YouTube and TikTok, plus Tubi, Pluto, and a whole slew of FAST channels that are effectively like broadcast TV, only someone is sucking up a ton of data on you to target ads better than broadcast TV can. Carr admitted as much when he announced the decision to rescind the ownership rule, calling it “outdated restrictions.” The internet has given us so much access that it seems absurd we’d still have these arbitrary limits on ownership for a dying medium. Which is effectively what Nexstar said in a statement after Carr announced his decision:

“For too long, local broadcasters were handcuffed from reaching the scale they needed to compete on a more level playing field by outdated federal rules that didn’t apply to the largest and most powerful companies like Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, or Netflix.”

It’s not great that YouTube or Instagram or Netflix command as much of our attention (and govern our politics) as they do, but the answer to that is not “even more giant corporations dictating what specific populations of people watch.” The answer is regulating those companies, not deregulating other industries. Yet at this point that’s what the current administration and Brendan Carr have done. They’re trying to push the Nexstar/Tegna merger. They want these conservative companies to control local news. Disney suing the FCC to protect its own freedom of speech is a great move in the right direction, but it also still feels like too little too late. The war for American TV airwaves has already been lost.

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