JACK POSOBIEC: President Trump FCC deregulation plan will keep the airwaves free for independent voices

With all the focus on artificial intelligence, President Trump has been working quietly to empower an old technology that’s open to all competition, free for anyone who wants to use it, and can never spy on you or sell your data. It’s TV and radio broadcasting. The Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr just scrapped the outdated national TV ownership cap that Democrats imposed decades ago to choke off conservative broadcasters. America First media broadcast on the public’s airwaves can finally grow and compete with Big Tech and the cable dinosaurs that hate you. Radio should be next. The rules governing radio were built for a world in which the station down the street was competing mostly with other stations down the street. That world is gone. Today, a local broadcaster competes for listeners and advertising dollars with podcasts, satellite radio, streaming services and technology platforms that can reach virtually every American without being subject to the same FCC ownership restrictions. Big Tech would love for radio to remain restricted but no one else should. Radio is one of the last mass communication systems that does not run through a filter. It doesn’t sit on others’ servers. It just broadcasts into the air for anybody to receive. The old ownership cap purposely boxed in conservative talk radio for generations while Silicon Valley built algorithms to decide what half the country receives for information. Turn the dial and you get news, talk, music, and faith without some H-1B programmer picking the menu, tracking you, and selling your data. And there’s no subscription to pay. The Left would love nothing more than to kill conservative talk radio. We shouldn’t let them. And we shouldn’t let them take a hatchet to Middle America either. For millions of farmers and ranchers, radio is how they get weather warnings, commodity and market news, local information and entertainment while they're in the tractor, truck or field. The FCC has noted that most farmers listen to agricultural radio, with many tuning into AM for more than an hour a day. And unlike an app or streaming service, an AM signal doesn't care whether you're thirty miles outside town with spotty cell service. You turn the dial, and it's there. That's one reason radio remains such an important part of the connective tissue of rural America. The Left has used its corrupt rules for years to starve smaller stations that kept local communities together and informed. The market changed but the rules did not. Lifting the cap the way Carr just did for TV and conservative radio can let the owners modernize and expand instead of getting bought or buried. In his historic United Nations speech this week, President Trump told the world that America would remain supreme in AI. Meanwhile, he’s protecting America’s last free media – broadcast TV and radio – from the corporatist Big Tech cartels. Graphic made with Grok AI.