Welcome to the era of 2026, where the media landscape is apparently being rewritten by a man whose hair has more structural integrity than the Federal Communications Commission’s old rulebook. If you’ve been reading the latest alarmist dispatches from the digital fainting couches of the tech press, you’ve heard the news: the 39 percent national ownership cap is dead, Brendan Carr is the new king of the airwaves, and the “Trumpian turn” of local TV is upon us.

Let’s take a moment to mourn the loss of a regulation born in 2004—a year when we were all still marveling at the Motorola Razr and wondering if this “Facebook” thing would last. The article’s primary claim is that the 39 percent cap was some sort of sacred, load-bearing wall holding up the cathedral of democracy. In reality, it was a cobwebbed relic of an era when people actually waited for the 6:00 PM news to find out if it was raining.

The assumption here is that by allowing one company to reach more than 39 percent of households, we are witnessing the birth of a terrifying “monopoly.” It’s an adorable sentiment, really. It ignores the fact that while local broadcast groups were busy fighting over the scraps of a dying linear TV model, companies like Alphabet and Meta were busy monopolizing the literal air you breathe and the thoughts you haven’t even had yet. Calling a broadcast merger a “monopoly” in 2026 is like accusing a local bookstore of being an existential threat to Amazon.

Then there’s the breathless critique of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s “deregulation” spree. The article frames this as a sudden, radical “Trumpian turn,” as if the concept of media consolidation wasn’t the brainchild of the Telecommunications Act of 1996—a bipartisan masterpiece of the Clinton era. To suggest that deregulation is some fringe, orange-hued phenomenon ignores thirty years of history where both sides of the aisle gleefully gutted ownership rules while pretending to care about “localism.”

The article assumes that keeping ownership fragmented ensures “diversity” and “local flavor.” Because nothing says “vibrant local journalism” like a struggling station in a mid-sized market with a budget of forty dollars and a green screen held up by duct tape. The hard truth that these critics hate to swallow is that in a world of Netflix-sized budgets, local TV stations need the scale of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate just to afford a weather radar that doesn’t look like a 1980s Atari game.

And let’s talk about the “Trumpian” label. It’s the ultimate SEO-friendly boogeyman. By branding the lifting of an outdated ownership cap as a “Trumpian turn,” the authors manage to bypass any actual economic analysis in favor of Pavlovian political signaling. If the FCC decided to change the color of its stationery, these newsletters would find a way to call it a “populist assault on white-space aesthetics.”

The logic presented is simple: Consolidation = Bad. Competition = Good. But they conveniently forget that “competition” in 2026 isn’t between two local news anchors in Cincinnati; it’s between local news as a concept and a TikTok algorithm that has already convinced half the population that birds aren’t real. If lifting a 22-year-old cap allows broadcast groups to actually compete with the digital behemoths that have been cannibalizing their ad revenue for a decade, it isn’t a threat to democracy—it’s a desperate attempt at a life support system.

So, while we clutch our pearls over the death of a 2004 regulation, let’s remember that the “future of local TV” was already on life support long before Brendan Carr picked up a pen. If a “Trumpian turn” means finally acknowledging that we aren’t living in the age of rabbit ears and dial-up internet, then perhaps it’s time to stop mourning the 39 percent cap and start wondering why it took until 2025 to realize the world had moved on. But sure, keep telling us how a broadcast merger is the real threat to the republic while you scroll through a newsfeed controlled by a single algorithm. The irony is the only thing currently in high-definition.