The anchor reading your local news at six o'clock has a name you recognise. The company that decides whether she has a job next year, what her newsroom is allowed to lead with, and whether the network show after her broadcast airs at all, almost certainly has a name you don't. This matters more than it sounds, because local TV is still the most-used local news source in America: about 65% of adults say they at least sometimes get news from a local TV station, according to Pew Research Center — down from 70% in 2018, but still ahead of everything else. * Start with the confusion that makes all of this invisible. Your "ABC station" is usually not owned by ABC. Networks own a handful of stations outright — the industry calls them owned-and-operated, or O&Os, and they cluster in the biggest cities. Everywhere else, the network licenses its programming to an affiliate owned by somebody else entirely. The network supplies the primetime schedule, the national evening news and the late-night show. The station group owns the broadcast licence, employs the anchors, runs the local newscast, decides what leads it — and holds the power to preempt, which means refusing to air something the network sent. Remember that verb. It comes back. * So who are the somebodies? Three names cover an enormous share of the country, and each one publishes its own numbers. Sinclair, Inc. describes itself as owning, operating or providing services to 177 television stations in 79 markets, affiliated with all the major networks. Gray Media states that as of May 15, 2026 it serves 117 full-power television markets reaching approximately 37% of US television households, with the top-rated station in 78 of them. And Nexstar Media Group was already the largest owner in the country before it moved on Tegna — 201 stations, according to a December 2025 letter from members of Congress, with Tegna adding 64 stations across 51 markets. * That last deal is the story of the decade in American local news, and it turns on a number: 39%. * Since 2004, federal rules barred any single company from owning broadcast stations reaching more than 39% of US television households. The logic goes back to the founding bargain of broadcasting — the airwaves are public property, a licence is a trust rather than a possession, and no one voice should be able to buy up the country. That was the theory. * The practice had a trapdoor in it called the UHF discount. Stations broadcasting on UHF frequencies count only 50% of their market's households toward the national cap; VHF stations count 100%. The FCC adopted this in 1985 for an entirely real reason: analogue UHF signals genuinely were weaker and faded faster with distance. Then television went digital and the technical excuse evaporated. The FCC eliminated the discount in August 2016, finding UHF stations "no longer technically inferior in any way" to VHF. In April 2017 a new commission reinstated it anyway. Run the arithmetic and the trapdoor is obvious: with the discount applied, a company sitting exactly at the 39% "cap" could physically reach as much as 78% of American households. The limit had not meant what it said for years. * It could still bite, though, and in 2018 it did. Sinclair tried to buy Tribune Media for $3.9 billion. To squeeze under the cap it proposed selling off stations — including WGN in Chicago at a price of $60 million — to buyers including entities connected to Sinclair chairman David Smith's own family and to Cunningham Broadcasting. FCC chairman Ajit Pai, no enemy of deregulation, said the evidence suggested Sinclair would keep controlling those stations "in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law," and moved to send the deal to an administrative law judge. The merger collapsed. In May 2020 Sinclair paid a $48 million civil penalty to close the resulting investigations — the largest penalty imposed on a broadcaster in FCC history. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel dissented anyway, saying the settlement helped Sinclair sweep "its past digressions under the rug." * Why does any of this belong in a media-literacy guide rather than a business column? Because ownership is a content question, and Sinclair supplied the clearest proof anybody has ever filmed. In spring 2018 the company required local anchors to record a promo denouncing "the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country," warning that "some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think.'" The sports site Deadspin cut the resulting broadcasts together — dozens of stations, different cities, different faces, one script, landing on the same closing line: "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy." Sinclair's then-news chief Scott Livingston called it a warning about fake news circulating on social media, and the company has consistently said its reporting is nonpartisan. Both things are on the record. What the montage demonstrated, whatever you conclude about the motive, is the mechanism: one corporate decision, hundreds of local mouths. * The 2025 version of that mechanism was subtler, because it wasn't a script — it was a schedule. In September 2025, FCC chairman Brendan Carr said on a podcast that media companies "can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead," adding: "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Within hours, Nexstar announced it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live! from its ABC affiliates. Sinclair did the same. Both resumed carrying the show on September 26. Carr later said he never threatened anyone's licence and that the station groups made their own commercial decisions. Hold two facts next to each other and decide for yourself what you're looking at: Nexstar preempted a network show hours after the regulator's remark, and Nexstar had a $6.2 billion acquisition sitting in that regulator's in-tray. * The acquisition is where the cap finally broke. On December 16, 2025, Representatives Summer Lee, Doris Matsui and Maxwell Frost, with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, wrote to Carr and the DOJ calling the deal "presumptively illegal because it would allow Nexstar to exceed national caps on station ownership," warning it would produce a company reaching 80% of US television households, and urging the FCC not to issue a waiver. In February 2026 President Trump endorsed the merger on Truth Social. In March the FCC and DOJ approved it — waiving the 39% cap — and Nexstar declared the deal closed. CEO Perry Sook's statement: "We are grateful to President Trump, [FCC] Chairman Carr, and the DOJ for recognizing the dynamic forces shaping the media landscape and enabling this transaction to move forward." * The courts were less impressed. Attorneys general from eight states, including California and New York, sued to block it, as did DirecTV, arguing the combination is anticompetitive and would raise consumer costs. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction and imposed a hold-separate order, freezing the merger. Nexstar appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which was set to hear arguments in the autumn of 2026. So as of August 2026 the company was booking Tegna's results in its financial statements — $2 billion in second-quarter revenue, $3.61 diluted earnings per share — while being legally barred from actually combining the two station groups. * Then, on August 6, 2026, the FCC removed the obstacle at the source. By a 2-1 party-line vote it repealed the 39% national ownership cap entirely. Carr, joined by Commissioner Olivia Trusty, said the rule had been "hamstringing" the industry; acquisitions will now be judged case by case. Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented: eliminating the cap "does not free local broadcasters from economic pressure, it just changes who is doing the squeezing," and the companies positioned to grow "are not local broadcasters, they are national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them." Supporters of the cap say they will sue. * The broadcasters' case deserves stating properly, because it is not nonsense. Sook's argument, made the morning after the vote, is that broadcasting should get to "compete on the same playing field" with "every other purveyor of video that we compete with that has access to 100% of U.S. households." He has a point. Netflix faces no household cap. Neither does YouTube. Pay-TV subscriptions keep falling, local newsrooms are genuinely expensive, and scale really does pay for cameras and salaries. Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley welcomed the repeal too. Sook also conceded the repeal would be only a "marginal benefit" in the Tegna case, which he said "is more about antitrust than the national ownership cap" — a rare piece of candour about what the cap was and wasn't doing. * Here is the thing to carry away, though. The cap was a blunt, leaky rule with a 1985 loophole bolted to it, and reasonable people can argue it had outlived its design. What replaced it is not a better rule — it is discretion. Case-by-case review means each deal is now decided by a commission whose chairman has already demonstrated, on the record, that he is willing to talk publicly about what he would like broadcasters to take off the air. A fixed limit is something a company can plan around. A discretionary approval is something a company can be encouraged to earn. * If you want to know who actually owns your station, this takes about four minutes. Every licensed US broadcast station must maintain an online public inspection file at publicfiles.fcc.gov — search your call letters and you will find the licensee's legal name, ownership reports, and the political-advertising file showing who bought airtime and for how much. Then search that licensee name and see how many other stations it holds. Do it once for the station you actually watch. The gap between the face on screen and the name on the licence is usually the most informative thing you will learn about your local news all year. * None of this means your local anchor is a fraud. Local TV journalists cover storms, councils, courts and school boards that nobody else covers, and they mostly do it for modest money in shrinking newsrooms. That is exactly why the ownership question matters rather than being a distraction from it. The reporting is local. The licence, the script policy, the preemption decision and the debt load are not. Knowing which is which is the entire skill.