Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong is credited with being the first to coin the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out” in March of 2025. Mockingly abbreviated to “TACO,” it quickly became part of the popular political lexicon. Armstrong was referring to Wall Street trades based on market dips caused by the threat of—and then the rapid retreat from—new tariffs on trade with other nations.

However, the term “TACO” has expanded to encompass the administration’s pattern of softening its initial, often outrageous demands to arrive at slightly more reasonable policies.

Like the one that insisted that Denmark had to hand over the whole of Greenland to the United States.

We continue to wonder whether the Federal Communications Commission and its Chairman, Brendan Carr, might follow with his own TACO-like move in his much-touted rush to repeal existing rules on broadcast TV station ownership.

It has been over five months since Nexstar Media, led by Chairman and CEO Perry Sook, announced its intent to acquire rival station group owner TEGNA for some $6.2 billion. The deal would expand Nexstar, the nation’s largest owner of local television stations, to control approximately 265 stations. Any transaction that results in a change of ownership for a broadcast licensee must be reviewed and approved by the Federal Communications Commission, aside from potentially owning more than two local TV stations in a single market, which isn’t permitted under the FCC’s present rules. Adding TEGNA’s existing portfolio of stations would give Sook’s company control of television stations covering 80% of the country’s television households. Nexstar, like other broadcasters, uses a series of so-called “discounts” included in the FCC’s rules to arrive at a figure that would cover only 56.4% of U.S. TV households post-transaction.

That calculation relies in part on a long-standing “UHF discount,” which reduces the coverage figure for stations transmitting in the Ultra High Frequency band (channels 14-36) by 50%. Since the 2009 transition to digital television, about three-quarters of all local TV stations now use the UHF band (even if they still refer to themselves by their legacy VHF channel numbers between 2 and 13). So this discount, that dates back to the analog television era, when UHF stations didn’t cover nearly as much area, is pretty much a legacy loophole.

That discounted figure of 56.4% would exceed the national “cap” that limits any one entity from owning local TV stations covering more than 39% of the country. The “cap” was written into law by the United States Congress, first in 1996, with a national cap of 35% in the Telecommunications Act passed that year. The cap would later be raised by Congress to its current level of 39% in the 2004 Consolidated Appropriations Act.

Although FCC Commissioner Carr has suggested that the FCC could approve Nexstar's acquisition of TEGNA, some believe that Congress would have to enact any change to, or elimination of, the national ownership cap. For its part, the FCC began to “refresh the record” on the issues of a national ownership cap and the UHF discount last June. It’s conducting a congressionally mandated “quadrennial review,” an every-four-year review of the rules governing local station ownership to determine whether they should be retained or modified in light of current competition.

That last bit is the hook that supporters of deregulating broadcast ownership are hanging their hopes on. Their position is that because of the challenges of competition from the largest tech companies (think Amazon, Google, Meta, etc.) the broadcasters need the freedom to grow bigger to survive their new competitiors and continue to deliver their “vital local services” to communities across the country and fulfill their license obligations to operate “in the public interest as a public trustee.”

The deadline for public comments on the FCC’s quadrennial review passed back on January 16th.

As you might imagine, the deal is facing opposition from a wide range of stakeholders, with much of their rationale contained in a detailed white paper authored by the DC law firm KressinPowers. We encourage you to click the link and download and read their 48-page analysis, which concludes that “the deal would deepen media consolidation, drive up consumer costs and further erode local television news.”

Nexstar has publicly stated that it expects the transaction to close in the second half of this year. To meet that timetable, the FCC needs to establish a framework for its review of the Nexstar acquisition of TEGNA and set a 180-day “shot clock” for approval or rejection of the acquisition.

Consider for a moment what might happen if the FCC came out in the next few weeks and said that it was “rethinking” its previous position on deregulation. Or what if FCC Chairman Carr said that he has been convinced that some regulation may still be needed for group ownership in the broadcasting industry?

To be very clear, we aren’t predicting this will happen for certain. (If we had any inside knowledge, we’d be calling our broker.) However, there is evidence that the current administration in Washington, DC, tends to propose extreme measures as its opening salvo in any situation and ultimately moves away from those positions after facing opposition, adopting more moderate or somewhat reasonable measures. (The best example we can point out to you is the roller coaster of implementing trade Tariffs on nations around the world.)

Like everyone following the broadcast industry, we are awaiting any word from the FCC on its deregulation decisions. We don’t think it is excessive hyperbole to describe the industry as “nearly paralyzed,” waiting for some signal from the Commission on what it will ultimately do and when it might do it.

As we were writing this column, FCC Chair Carr followed another chapter from the administration playbook: When you can’t deliver on one promise, distract everyone with something else.

In this case, Carr continues to pursue his goal of making the Commission something akin to “The Content Police.” At yesterday's monthly press conference, the Chairman explained how the FCC’s “equal time” rule will now be administered. The original rule requires that broadcasters provide equivalent airtime opportunities to all political candidates for the same office if they provide airtime to any of them. There is an exemption from the rule for all “bona fide news programs.” In 1996, the FCC granted exemptions for talk shows (the first was Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show”) to be considered “news programs,” with the appearance of a candidate in such a setting usually treated as a “newsworthy interview.”

Carr states that the FCC will determine, in its sole judgment, whether talk shows such as “The View” or “Jimmy Kimmel Live” qualify for an exemption from the equal-time provisions. What this means is that if you happen to be an ABC affiliate, could airing an episode of either of those shows bring your FCC-issued license into question because your network’s programming was found to violate the equal time rule? Make no mistake, this was Mr. Carr firing back specifically at Jimmy Kimmel, who had raised his concerns about FCC pressure in a recent monologue.

Kimmel noted that it isn’t the 1950s anymore, when there were only three television networks. The media landscape has transformed to include cable, satellite, streaming, and social media. The only outlets required to follow the “equal time” provisions are broadcasters, “because we use the public airways.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Carr addressed Kimmel’s point by saying, “This is one respect where I really agree with Jimmy Kimmel. Part of what he said was that this rule applies uniquely to broadcast, because it’s not cable, it’s not a podcast, it’s not other forms of distribution,” Carr said. “Some people have said that, because of the rise of cable channels and other distribution means that it doesn’t make sense anymore to have unique broadcast rules, and to that, I would say a couple things: One, that’s ultimately up for Congress to decide, it’s not for us to ignore the law. And two: I think it actually may cut the other way, which is to say, if you don’t want to comply with the public interest standard with your programming now, you have so many other ways of getting it out there, whether it’s a podcast, a cable channel, a streaming service, that if you want the unique privilege of distributing over this one type of thing, broadcast TV, then we should really make sure that you’re actually complying with the rules of that distribution mechanism.”

Funny how on this point, “that’s ultimately up for Congress to decide.” But Carr then proceeded to “slice his bologna a little thinner” by later stating that this newfound focus on ensuring such balance for political candidates applies only to television. Responding to a question about whether the FCC’s review of qualifying for an exemption would also apply to talk radio programs, which are overwhelmingly considered conservative. The Chairman said:

There wasn’t a relevant precedent that we saw that was being misconstrued on the radio side, as that wasn’t part of anything in that decision. It was focused on the potential misreading of precedents on the broadcast TV side…” So the likes of Hannity, Levin, Loesch, et al., will not have to worry about any pesky requirements to provide equal time to all political candidates, nor will the stations that air their daily shoutfests.

Why? Fellow FCC Commissioner, Democrat Anna Gomez called it out in her own remarks to the press: “As if there was any doubt, the last few weeks have shown that this FCC is no longer independent and it is no longer primarily interested in acting in the interest of consumers. The FCC is now a political arm of this administration.”

Back to whether or not the FCC might go “TACO” mode on the matter of changing the broadcast ownership rules, the Nexstar-TEGNA deal isn’t the only transaction pending at the moment. Other smaller deals that have been announced are also pending the FCC’s decisions on what might be permitted in the months and years ahead. Additionally, there is the potential for an explosion of new deals, with multiple parties awaiting a clear signal akin to the starting cannon round that signaled the start of the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889.

At that time, there were two groups known as “Boomers” and “Sooners.” The first group, the Boomers, campaigned for the federal government to open the “unassigned lands” in what was then called "Indian Territory" to settlers. Sooners was a pejorative term for those who didn’t wait for the official start of the land rush and who skirted or cheated the system to secure an advantage in acquiring the best plots of land. It will be interesting to ultimately see if a “broadcasting land rush” comes to reality in 2026, and who will be known as “Boomers” or “Sooners.”

Aside from the proud alumni of the University of Oklahoma, of course.

For our part, we just hope that a modern-day “land rush” for broadcast signals isn’t triggered by an innocent lunch order to a Mexican restaurant.

Stranger things have happened in the past twelve months.

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