Media Action Center is a group of of concerned residents throughout the U.S. led by former Emmy-winning broadcaster turned media reformer Sue Wilson. We have successfully influenced policy at the Federal Communications Commission and at local TV and Radio stations throughout the country for more than a decade to ensure We the People are truly served by the publicly owned airwaves. (See the archive of our work under "older posts.") We successfully forced Entercom to give up its $13.5 million license to KDND for killing a woman in a radio water drinking stunt. We have a long-running action to label Alex Jones' radio show as the fiction it is, which has taken Jones' program off dozens of radio stations nationwide. We educated the Supreme Court in FCC v Prometheus Radio on critical information to #SaveLocalNews.

Please see MAC's 2018 Comment to the FCC (below) to learn why these actions are crucial to Democracy. Find full journalistic coverage of the Supreme Court case and our Amicus brief, Sinclair Broadcasting's shell game, Alex Jones, the Strange v Entercom trial and other public interest media issues at SueWilsonReports.com. For background on how we arrived in this era of disinformation and what to do about it, see Wilson's 2009 documentary Broadcast Blues.

Media Action Center Cited by FCC in Decision to Limit Licenseship in a Single TV Market

 December 26, 2023

The Federal Communications Commission has made its final rulings in its Quadrennial Regulatory Review.  To the dismay of the broadcast industry, the FCC has ruled that a broadcaster cannot automatically expect to license two Top-Four (Network affiliate) stations in the same TV market without getting FCC approval in advance.

Says the FCC, "... a broadcaster cannot acquire two stations ranked in the top four in audience share in a market—known as the Top-Four Prohibition—unless, at the request of an applicant, the Commission finds that such an acquisition serves the public interest, convenience, and necessity on a case-by-case basis."

Media Action Center provided both the FCC and the Supreme Court with photographic evidence that in TV markets where Station groups license two Network affiliates in the same town, those licensees are merely putting the same news content on both Network stations, rather than providing "more and better local news" as they had promised.

Many other Media Reform groups, lawyers, and academics contributed to this success. We are grateful that our combined efforts brought this matter to a successful conclusion for We the People.