FCC Report and Order Relaxes Radio Ownership Caps (MM Docket No. 91-140, 7 FCC Rcd 2755) — Then Cuts Its Own National Cap on Reconsideration (FCC 92-361)

This entry documents a two-stage 1992 FCC radio-ownership proceeding, MM Docket No. 91-140, whose commonly cited numbers are frequently flattened into one document. They are not one document. Verified against the primary text of FCC 92-361 (the Memorandum Opinion and Order on reconsideration), which quotes and supersedes the original Report and Order throughout:

Stage 1 — the original Report and Order, “7 FCC Rcd 2755,” adopted March 1992 (exact day not recoverable from the reconsideration order’s text, which refers to it only as “the March vote” / “the Commission’s March action”; published in the Federal Register August 11, 1992 at 57 Fed. Reg. 35763, with an original effective date of August 1, 1992). This order:

• Raised the national radio ownership cap from 12 AM / 12 FM stations to 30 AM / 30 FM stations nationwide.
• Relaxed local ownership limits by market-size tier and brought local time-brokerage agreements (LMAs) — where a licensee sells more than 15% of another station’s airtime and the stations’ principal community contours overlap — within the ownership-attribution rules for the first time.
• Was never allowed to take effect as written. Facing an industry backlash (NAB itself asked for reconsideration, warning the 30/30 cap was too permissive and could harm competition) and a congressional appropriations rider threatening to freeze the ownership rules back at the old 12-12-12 national level by statute, the FCC stayed its own August 1, 1992 effective date on July 30, 1992 (FCC 92-351) pending reconsideration.

Stage 2 — the Memorandum Opinion and Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rule Making, FCC 92-361, adopted August 5, 1992, released September 4, 1992. This is the document that actually set the operative caps. On reconsideration, the Commission cut its own newly-adopted national cap, reducing it from 30 AM/30 FM to 18 AM / 18 FM stations, rising to 20 AM / 20 FM after two years — plus a non-controlling attributable interest in three additional stations per service if minority- or small-business-controlled. It also restructured the local rules: for markets with 15+ stations, a single entity could own up to 2 AM and 2 FM stations, subject to a 25%-combined-audience-share concentration test (replacing the R&O’s more complex market-tier system); for markets with fewer than 15 stations, up to three stations (no more than two in the same service), constituting under 50% of market stations. FCC 92-361 also declined petitioners’ request to loosen the new LMA-attribution rule, leaving it in place substantively unchanged from the R&O.

Correction to the ticket’s numbers. The ticket that generated this entry stated the 1992 order “raised national radio caps 12→30 AM/FM” and changed local ownership “12-12-12 → 18-18-12.” Both figures need correction:

• 12→30 AM/FM is the ORIGINAL R&O’s number, superseded five months later. The cap that actually took effect and governed the industry going into the 1994 and 1996 rounds was 18/18 (→20/20 after two years), set by the reconsideration order FCC 92-361, not 30/30.
• “18-18-12” does not appear anywhere in the primary text of either document. “12-12-12” appears exactly once in FCC 92-361, and only as a description of the pre-1992 national ownership status quo that a congressional appropriations rider threatened to reimpose by statute — not as a local-market ownership formula. The actual post-1992 local rule was a station-count-per-market-tier system (2 AM/2 FM in markets of 15+ stations; 3 stations, ≤2 per service, in smaller markets, all subject to a 25% audience-share concentration cap), not an “18-18-12” figure. The mechanism note this ticket was drawn from should be corrected accordingly.

Why the reconsideration order is load-bearing rather than a footnote. The five-month gap between the R&O’s 30/30 cap and FCC 92-361’s 18/18 cap is not a rounding difference — it is a full policy retreat under industry and congressional pressure, immediately followed (per the FCC’s own two-year escalator written into FCC 92-361) by an automatic rise to 20/20, and then a further FCC order in 1994 pushing the cap higher again (documented in prose, not yet as its own timeline entry, in media-1987-1996-deregulatory-bridge-fairness-doctrine-repeal-telecom-act). The ratchet pattern — retreat under pressure, then resume climbing via an already-built escalator clause — is itself a mechanism worth naming: administrative deregulation survived a political confrontation by trading depth for durability, then made up the difference on autopilot.

This keystone administrative step sits between the FCC’s 1987 abolition of the Fairness Doctrine (1987-08-04–fcc-abolishes-fairness-doctrine) and the Telecommunications Act of 1996’s outright elimination of the national radio cap (1996-02-08–telecommunications-act-eliminates-media-ownership-limits). By the time Congress acted in 1996, the FCC had already moved the national ceiling four times administratively (12→30→18→20, with a further 1994 increase per CRS R45338) and had already established LMAs as a legitimate ownership-attribution vehicle — pre-loading the scale of consolidation (e.g., Clear Channel’s subsequent 40-to-1,240-station expansion) that the 1996 Act’s cap elimination made possible.

Verified absences / discipline notes

• The original Report and Order’s exact adoption date (day within March 1992) and its own FCC docket number were not recovered this session. FCC 92-361 refers to it only as “the Report and Order” and “the March vote”/“the March action,” without citing its own FCC-XX-XXX number in the extracted text. A brute-force numeric probe of docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-92-*A1.pdf in the plausible range did not turn up a document matching MM Docket 91-140 at 7 FCC Rcd 2755, and FCC document numbers in this range do not run in strict page-order (a check found “No. 7” issue documents both before and after “No. 9” issue documents by FCC number), making further brute-force search unreliable. Dated this entry 1992-03-01 (month precision) to reflect “March 1992” as the most specific adoption date confirmed by primary-source text. If a future pass locates the original R&O directly (search govinfo.gov’s FCC Record volume 7 table of contents, or the FCC’s ECFS docket system for MM Docket 91-140, once WebSearch budget is available), update date_precision to day and add its FCC number.
• 57 Fed. Reg. 35763 (Aug. 11, 1992) and FCC 92-351 (the stay order, adopted July 30, 1992) were identified only via citation inside FCC 92-361’s footnotes, not independently fetched and verified as primary documents this session. They are cited here as tier-1 because FCC 92-361 quotes them directly with full pinpoint cites, but a future pass should pull FCC 92-351 and the Federal Register notice directly to confirm.
• CRS R45338 was not independently fetched this session (403 on direct PDF URL, congress.gov page not rendered via curl); cited here on the strength of the mechanism note’s prior citation and general reliability as an FCC-ownership-rules tracking document, not independently re-verified against its text.

Load-bearing for

• media-1987-1996-deregulatory-bridge-fairness-doctrine-repeal-telecom-act — corrects the specific national-cap and local-rule figures cited in that mechanism note.
• Capture Cascade — media lane’s deregulation→consolidation→capture cycle, first turn.

See also

• 1987-08-04–fcc-abolishes-fairness-doctrine
• 1996-02-08–telecommunications-act-eliminates-media-ownership-limits