FCC Chairman complains about Great American channels not being on YouTubeTV

Claims they air “faith-based programming” – or something like that 

So what does the term “faith-based programming” mean? 

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr seems to be playing fast and loose with the definition as he blasted Google-owned YouTubeTV for not carrying a pair of channels owned by Great American Media: Great American Family and Great American Faith & Living.

The former was once known as Great American Country (as a country music channel) and the latter as Ride TV, an equestrian channel. An investment group led by Tom Hicks and Bill Abbott bought both channels from Warner Bros. Discovery in 2021 and established GAC Media, or Great American Media (the company is not related to the former Great American Broadcasting, the name the former Taft stations used in the late 1980s before changing their name to Citicasters.)

Last week, Carr sent a letter to Google, asking why the virtual provider doesn’t carry the twin channels after he received complaints from fans, as he warned Google the company may be discriminating against Great America for religious reasons. Great American’s channels are carried by other virtual providers, including Frindly, Hulu with Live TV, Philo, and DirecTV Stream, and operates two ad-supported channels on regular YouTube – Great American Family (different from the cable channel) and PureFlix, a subscription-based channel. 

When you hear “faith-based programming,” you usually think of religious channels, or non-secular fare such as TBN or Daystar, the current WJYS, or the old WCFC-TV, which was sold to PAX (now Ion) in 1998. But in recent years, the definition has changed to feature “family-friendly” secular programming.

A look at the schedules of both channels shows a hodge podge of well-worn off-network reruns such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Perry Mason, Andy Griffith, and Murder She Wrote; violent westerns, a few family-friendly religious-themed movies and original shows, Christmas movies, and unscripted shows that have nothing to do with religion. 

YouTubeTV said it does not discriminate against any channel in nature and would welcome any negotiations, and pointed out it already carries three Hallmark Channels, which targets female and family-friendly audiences. 

This comes at a time when programming geared toward more right-leaning and rural audiences has gained popularity during Trump’s third presidential campaign and his win last November amid the decreasing media clout of the nation’s three biggest markets of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, which are traditionally blue and have lost population over the last decade. It’s a reversal of what we saw in the early 1970s when the major networks (notably CBS with its “rural purge”) abandoned such programming to attract more urban audiences as advertisers’ preferences shifted. One market in red state Texas – the Dallas-Fort Worth “Metroplex” area, is now the fourth-largest in the country just behind Chicago, and is where Great American Media is headquartered, along with Nexstar Media Group and Dr. Phil’s Merit Street Studios. 

Last week, Free TV Networks launched new multicast channel Busted featuring off-network reruns of police reality series. The genre fell out of favor five years ago after the death of George Floyd. 

Carr acknowledged the FCC has little say in how virtual providers operate and doesn’t have any “must-carry” provisions cable and satellite have, which many secular channels choose to get on those platforms, as stated by the 1992 Cable Act, but is asking companies for input on how to shape possible regulations in the future. Currently, virtual providers are not obligated to pay TV stations any retransmission consent fees, though broadcast groups can strike deals for individual outlets, such as Weigel does for WCIU while CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox have blanket deals for all of their affiliates, shutting out other broadcast groups from earning said revenue. 

You have to wonder why Carr is questioning the absence of Great American from YouTubeTV and not channels from other companies such as Lifetime, A+E, and History Channel, or regional sports networks CHSN and Marquee, as neither has been made available to Chicago viewers. Has Carr even bothered to watch Great American’s networks? The FCC shouldn’t be in the business of picking what channels go where, especially one who thinks a show that features people being murdered in a place called Cabot Cove every day is passed off as “faith-based programming”.