WASHINGTON—As the NRB 2026 Convention for religious broadcasters gets set to open on Feb. 17, the National Association of Broadcasters has issued a new blog post arguing that eliminating ownership caps will help religious broadcasters better carry out their mission.
“Americans are looking for a media landscape that reflects the full diversity of our communities,” Michelle Lehman, chief of staff and executive vice president, Public Affairs at the NAB wrote in the post. “That includes varied political viewpoints, local journalism, cultural programming and faith-based voices that serve audiences often overlooked by national media. Yet one of the most significant barriers to that goal remains an outdated federal policy: the national television ownership cap.”
In filings with the Federal Communications Commission, religious broadcasters have expressed mixed views regarding the elimination of the current rule that station groups can reach no more than 39% of the population.
The NRB, for example, has filed comments with the FCC opposing changes in ownership rules while one of the largest religious broadcasters, Trinity Broadcasting Network has come out in favor of eliminating ownership caps.
“They [the ownership caps] remain an important tool for preserving localism, protecting viewpoint diversity, and ensuring there is room in the marketplace for mission-driven television stations whose ultimate purpose is not simply distribution, but also ministry, reaching viewers, serving communities, and sharing the Gospel,” the NRB said in a separate blog post explaining its FCC filing.
In the NAB post, Lehman reiterated arguments made by Trinity Broadcasting Network. She said that the Trinity filing “made a compelling case for why this arbitrary limit no longer serves the public interest, stifling the voices of religious broadcasters like themselves.”
“For more than 50 years, Trinity has owned and operated stations that deliver faith-based programming free of charge to viewers in each of its licensed local communities,” wrote Trinity Broadcasting president Michael W. Crouch in a letter to the FCC. “Trinity competes directly with streaming services, digital platform, and multinational technology companies—many of which control access to audiences through opaque algorithms, subscription fees or content moderation policies.”
Like other proponents of ownership deregulation, Trinity argued that these rules no longer reflect the current media landscape where broadcasters compete against national cable networks, global streaming platforms, social media companies and multinational technology firms that face no limits on national reach. Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and TikTok can serve 100% of American households, shape audience behavior through algorithms and monetize attention at unprecedented scale. Local broadcasters, by contrast, remain constrained by a rule that limits their reach to just 39% of U.S. television households.
“For Christian broadcasters, free, over-the-air television remains one of the few distribution platforms where religious expression can reach audiences without gatekeepers, paywalls, or platform bias,” Crouch continues. “Policies that weaken broadcast television therefore weaken religious expression itself.”
“The national ownership cap does exactly that,” Lehman added. “By limiting broadcasters’ ability to achieve scale, it restricts access to capital, reduces investment in content and makes it harder for mission-driven networks to sustain free service in a hyper-competitive marketplace. The FCC has both the authority and the responsibility to modernize its ownership rules. As Trinity Broadcasting Network’s filing makes clear, the national cap no longer reflects marketplace realities and actively undermines core public interest goals.”
“If policymakers truly want to preserve varied voices in American media, including religious broadcasters, they must stop treating scale as the enemy of diversity,” she concluded. “In today’s media environment, scale is often the very thing that makes diversity possible.”
