He wants to own every commercially licensed radio station in Nebraska’s state capital, Lincoln. This will require a waiver of the nation’s local ownership rules as they pertain to Radio from the FCC, and Jeff Warshaw has personally asked FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to erase the need for a rule exemption altogether.
The Connoisseur Media CEO sat down earlier this week with Carr, urging him to move quickly on relaxing the nation’s radio ownership rules. If not, Warshaw warned, inaction puts local radio at risk of suffering the same fate as the newspaper industry.
Warshaw further argued that over-the-air radio does not operate in an isolated market and competes daily against digital platforms and other local media. As such, he believes the FCC’s rules have not kept pace with that reality.
Radio ownership limit reform is one thing the agency continues to ponder as part of its long-delayed 2022 Quadrennial Review.
Warshaw’s meeting with Carr was detailed in an ex parte filing submitted to the Commission by Connoisseur’s legal counsel, David Oxenford of Wilkinson Barker Knauer. The filing cites a sharp deterioration in Radio’s competitive position over the past decade, with AM and FM’s share of both listening time and local advertising revenue cut roughly in half. Meanwhile, the local advertising share captured by out-of-market digital competitors has grown substantially, and time spent with digital audio now exceeds traditional radio listening.
The meeting with Carr is the latest step in a sustained lobbying effort Warshaw has waged at the Commission. In January, Connoisseur joined a coalition of broadcasters that includes Townsquare Media, Bonneville, and Midwest Communications in filing joint reply comments calling for the elimination of the Local Radio Ownership Rule altogether.
Last month, Warshaw filed additional comments in the proceeding, arguing that Spotify’s AI-driven Prompted Playlist feature, which blends music and podcasts into a single product, proves digital audio platforms compete directly with broadcast radio, making the case for repealing ownership caps outright.
Warshaw’s push for deregulation has run alongside an aggressive acquisition strategy that has tested the boundaries of the current rules. Connoisseur won an FCC waiver to close on Bonneville International’s San Francisco-Oakland station group last month. In Lincoln, Connoisseur seeks to acquire NRG Media’s stations in the market. This would give Connoisseur ownership of all 11 commercially rated stations in the market, based on Fall 2025 ratings.
— Reporting by Cameron Coats, in New York
