Carr calls Nexstar-Tegna deal a win for local news. Not everyone is buying it.

The Federal Communications Commission voted on more ‘delete’ items at its March 2026 open meeting, but none generated more friction than a deal that wasn’t even on the agenda.

The $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group had already closed. The FCC’s Media Bureau had already approved it. And by the time FCC Chairman Brandon Carr stepped to the podium for his post-meeting press conference, the agency had already filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit urging judges to reject an emergency stay sought by opponents of the transaction.

What followed was an extended exchange that revealed the gap between how Carr characterizes the deal and how critics, including his own colleague on the commission, see it.

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The chairman’s case

At the press conference, Carr framed broadcast consolidation as a necessary response to an industry under pressure, pointing to the decline of local newspapers as a cautionary tale.

“If we care as a policy matter in this country about having local news, local reporting, gumshoe journalists, the place that that’s taking place right now more than any other place is the reporters that are attached to local broadcast TV stations,” Carr said.

He acknowledged the deal was approved at the bureau level — below the full commission — but suggested that could change.

“This was a decision by the staff. Staff decisions are initial decisions. They’re not final decisions. There may, in fact, be a commission vote on this,” he said, noting that an application for review had been filed seeking full commission consideration.

When asked whether the bureau-level approval was appropriate for a transaction of this scale, Carr said the decision was “consistent with agency precedent and practice if you look at similar scope and scale of transactions.”

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That framing glosses over a significant legal question.

Congress set the national broadcast ownership cap at 39% of U.S. television households and, according to critics, explicitly stripped the FCC of authority to waive or modify it in 2004. The Media Bureau approved the deal anyway, waiving the cap on the grounds of good cause shown.

In its D.C. Circuit filing, the agency argued the combined company would be able “to expand their investments in local news, and compete more effectively in the modern media marketplace.” It also said the bureau had acted within its authority and that opponents had not met the high bar required for emergency relief.

A colleague’s sharply different view

Commissioner Anna Gomez did not mince words in her own post-meeting press conference, calling it “flatly illegal.”

“Congress set the national broadcast ownership cap at 39% of American homes,” Gomez said. “It reaffirmed that limit three times over 20 years, most recently in 2004, when it explicitly stripped the FCC of any authority to waive or modify it. The law is not ambiguous. The FCC cannot rewrite it. It cannot ignore it.”

Gomez said the transaction also raised procedural concerns independent of its merits. Under the FCC’s own rules, she said, decisions involving new or novel legal questions must go before the full commission rather than be decided at the bureau level.

“A transaction of this magnitude, one that raises unresolved questions of federal law that the commission has never previously decided, required open deliberation before all sitting commissioners,” she said. “Instead, it got a quiet sign-off designed to avoid public scrutiny.”

She described the approval as part of what she called a “billionaire bypass,” a pattern she said she also saw in the FCC’s handling of the Paramount-Skydance transaction.

“If you are a billionaire with business before a government agency and a perceived friend of the White House, your transaction will get fast-track approval,” Gomez said.

Carr did not directly respond to those characterizations at his own press conference.

The stay question

Opponents of the deal, including Newsmax, Free Press, the Broadband Communications Association of Pennsylvania, and others, filed motions for an emergency stay in both the D.C. Circuit and in California after Nexstar announced the transaction had closed. The National Religious Broadcasters filed an amicus brief supporting the stay.

At the press conference, Carr was asked about the status of the stay request.

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“There was a request for stay, I believe, filed on Friday, almost a week ago, that requested a 24-hour turnaround from the FCC,” he said. “Obviously, we did not issue a stay within those 24 hours, and the parties have now moved on to the court.”

He also pointed to D.C. Circuit precedent suggesting the ownership cap language in the Communications Act is not an absolute statutory bar — citing what he described as a Fox-related case from around 2000 in which the court ruled Congress directed the FCC to change its rule but did not impose a hard limit.

Gomez, meanwhile, said the passage of time was working against any remedy.

“The problem is that time is on the side of the transaction itself,” she said. “The longer this goes, the more difficult it’s going to be to actually do something about this illegal order.”

In its D.C. Circuit brief, the FCC argued the bureau “reasonably found that in light of a transformed media landscape, as well as Nexstar’s commitments concerning divestiture of certain stations, increased local news programming, and maintenance of retransmission consent rates, the public interest benefits of the proposed transaction outweighed any potential public interest harms.”

Nexstar agreed to divest stations in six markets as a condition of the approval.

Affiliate power and preemption

Beyond the deal itself, Carr used the press conference to expand on a related theme he has raised at several recent events: what he described as a “power imbalance” between local broadcast stations and the major national networks.

He said the FCC received a significant record in a proceeding it opened seeking comment on the affiliate-network relationship and is now “putting together various options at this point, either near term or potentially rulemakings.”

Carr said preemption, the right of local stations to decline to air network programming, had become less common and suggested the FCC may create a presumption that if a broadcaster retaliates against a local station for exercising its preemption right by pulling its affiliation agreement, that action would be treated as a violation of FCC rules.

“If you exercise that right, and as a result, you get your affiliation with the national programmer pulled, I think that effectively undermines the rule itself,” he said.

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He stopped short of announcing any formal rulemaking.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz had also weighed in, saying the Nexstar-Tegna deal should have gone through a full commission vote rather than the bureau. Carr said he and Cruz had a “great relationship” and called the senator’s work on the committee “phenomenal,” without directly engaging with the criticism.

So why does all this matter?

The Nexstar-Tegna deal is, at its core, a test of how far the current FCC is willing to stretch its own rules – and whether the courts will let it.

The ownership cap at issue was set by Congress, not the FCC, and Congress has repeatedly reaffirmed it. Whether or not you accept Carr’s local-news-needs-saving argument, the procedural shortcuts here are hard to wave away. Approving a deal of this scale at the bureau level, without a full commission vote or public deliberation, is exactly the kind of move that tends to get unwound on appeal.

For broadcasters, the short-term winner is obvious: Nexstar, which now controls a larger portfolio and, by its own account, expects to collect hundreds of millions in new retransmission consent fees. Viewers in markets where Nexstar now owns multiple stations may see programming that looks increasingly similar across channels.

The longer-term picture is murkier.

If courts side with opponents and issue a stay, integration could halt mid-stream, an operationally disruptive outcome for both companies. If the FCC’s legal theory holds, it sets a precedent that the bureau, acting without full commission review, can waive statutory ownership caps for any sufficiently large broadcaster that can make a credible case about the “transformed media landscape.”

For smaller broadcasters without scale, the message from this FCC meeting was not subtle: the queue moves faster for some than for others.