In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court delivered a major Kavanaugh-authored opinion finding the FCC has the right to relax media ownership rules, as the determination of what determines media ownership by law rests with the FCC.
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the FCC was within its legal authority to relax a series of media ownership rules in 2017, when Republicans still held the majority.
In a unanimous opinion written by Brett Kavanaugh, the justices held that the FCC in 2017 “made a reasonable predictive judgment based on the evidence it had” in changing the rules. Back then, the commission, in a party line vote, lifted a ban on owning a broadcast station and newspaper in the same market. The FCC also made it easier for companies to own two of the top four TV stations in the same market, along with a series of other measures.
The public interest group Prometheus Radio Project challenged the changes, arguing that the FCC had failed to adequately consider the impact that they would have on minority and female ownership of media outlets.
Kavanuagh noted that “the FCC acknowledged the gaps in the data sets it relied on, and noted that, despite its repeated requests for additional data, it had received no countervailing evidence suggesting that changing the three ownership rules was likely to harm minority and female ownership.
“Prometheus also asserts that the FCC ignored two studies submitted by a commenter that purported to show that past relaxations of the ownership rules had led to decreases in minority and female ownership levels. But the record demonstrates that the FCC considered those studies and simply interpreted them differently,” he wrote.
He wrote that the Administrative Procedure Act, which spells out how agencies can set regulations, “imposes no general obligation on agencies to conduct or commission their own empirical or statistical studies.”
“In light of the sparse record on minority and female ownership and the FCC’s findings with respect to competition, localism, and viewpoint diversity, the Court cannot say that the agency’s decision to repeal or modify the ownership rules fell outside the zone of reasonableness for purposes of the APA,” he wrote.
The unanimous decision is disappointing, but it's one of those "the law is what the law is" things. The FCC gts to make its own determinations and deliberations on the field where they hold legal sway, because that's what the law says is supposed to happen.
We'll see what this means, but what this should mean is "stop electing Republicans to the White House, America".
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