Radio & Television Business Report

It was an unexpected turn on Capitol Hill, but now the fight to keep AM radio in the automobile dashboard has a new vehicle to a floor vote. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted Thursday to include the AM Act's language in Chairman Brett Guthrie's Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026.

The FCC's May Open Meeting produced a unanimous vote on four items, including streamlining the DIRS, but after the meeting adjourned, Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioner Anna Gomez were far from one accord.  Separate press conferences offered starkly different accounts of where the commission is headed.

For Connoisseur Media, and any other broadcast licensee currently navigating a foreign ownership remediation at the FCC, a Tuesday filing brought some much-needed clarity, but also a few speed bumps — especially as the Jeff Warshaw-led radio group goes full steam ahead on its aggressive M&A plan.

A three-judge federal appeals court panel on Friday expressed doubts that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia erred in its August 2025 decision that a racial discrimination claim lobbed by Standard General head Soohyung Kim against the FCC has no merit.

With the May 7 release of its first quarter earnings results, Gray Media indicated that it is seeing some "softness" in core advertising in Q2. Now, one prominent Wall Street financial analyst has responded by slicing his 1-year target price for "GTN."

The biggest names in Hispanic radio will be under one roof in Phoenix next week, and here's the cold, hard truth. Deals get done here. Hires get made here. Lessons get learned directly from the people at the top. If your competitor is at Hispanic Radio Conference 2026 and you're not, you'll feel it, one way or another.

Power 105.1's The Breakfast Club—one of more than 15 iHeartMedia shows brought to Netflix under the pair's exclusive video podcast partnership announced last December—is headed to the platform live, daily, and starting June 1, marking the first live weekday programming offering in the streaming giant's history.

A music industry trade association representing Christian and Gospel labels is asking the FCC to treat FM and AM as two separate regulatory problems in its still-pending 2022 Quadrennial Review, holding the line on local commercial FM ownership caps while eliminating limits on how many AM stations a single entity may own within a given market.

The Broadcasters Foundation of America's 2026 Summer Sessions arrives in New York City on BFOA Giving Day, Thursday, June 25, with a free Media Mixer hosted by Z100 (WHTZ) personality Maxwell, a special appearance by former CBS Radio executive Dan Mason, and a performance by The Voice alumnus Carolina Rial.

Your competitors would prefer you not show up. They don’t want you to soak up the information and engage in the conversations about the future of Hispanic radio. Your colleagues will be sorry they missed you. They were looking forward to sharing the experience and the entertainment at the 16th Hispanic Radio Conference with you!

Local digital advertising is still growing, but operators relying on prior-year baselines to set targets may already be falling behind. That was the central takeaway from Borrell Associates' annual benchmarking webinar, as executives from Townsquare Media, Bonneville International, and Newsday walked through their strategies for success.

Cox Media Group is facing a nearly $1 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over an AI-powered "Active Listening" advertising service that the agency says falsely claimed to harvest conversations from smart devices to serve targeted ads to consumers.

A prominent conservative media figure and political commentator with close ties to the Trump orbit is on the hook for $41,000 after an FCC investigation found one of his broadcast television stations serving the Susquehanna Valley filed or missed dozens of required public file documents over its license term.

Most marketers already know brand-building works. The harder question, and the one a new report from WARC and four research partners sets out to answer, is why so few of them are actually doing it. The culprit, according to a survey of more than 200 senior marketers, is eight blockers spanning cultural, procedural, and structural misalignments.

A new industry survey puts a number on the gap: advertisers are deploying agentic AI at a rate 60 percentage points higher than sellers of ad inventory, exposing a structural mismatch that could fundamentally reshape how media inventory gets bought and sold before the sell side is equipped to handle it.

Despite efforts in D.C. to limit its use in the U.S. due to its ties to the Chinese government and a new effort led by 14 state attorneys general to impose "significant penalties" on it for its harms to American youth, TikTok is a major social media platform that isn't fading away anytime soon. Data from Pew indicate that adults — not kids — are big-time users.