Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court.

I'm John Carlo Conoparo.

I'm Zach Smith.

And welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

Welcome back to another episode of SCOTUS 101. How are you, Zach? I'm doing okay, G.C. How are you?

Doing well. So give us the rundown of the Supreme Court this week. Well, it's been a relatively

quiet week for the court with no new grants or opinions and only two oral arguments.

Of course, you may have seen the justices had another engagement on Wednesday with Justice

Sonia Sotomayor administering the vice presidential oath of office and the chief justice

administering the presidential oath of office. G.C., what was going on with oral arguments this week?

Well, we had two. The first step was the Federal Communications Commission versus

Prometheus Radio Project. The issue in this case is whether the Federal Communications

Commission, I'm going to call it the FCC, lawfully relaxed a rule called the cross-ownership rule,

which bars the same entity from owning both a newspaper and either a radio or TV station in the

same market. Now, the case is pretty technical, but it has serious implications for how Americans

consume media. The cross-ownership rule is one of many very old FCC rules that were

aimed at limiting monopolization of local media markets. And to do that, they forbid any one person

or company from rying up a bunch of local media outlets. In 2017, the FCC relaxed some of these

old rules, explaining that they were no longer relevant in a media market dominated by the internet, nationwide newspapers, and TV outlets.

In short, old-fashioned local media, especially local newspapers, were dying, so the FCC concluded that it no longer made sense to prevent someone from buying multiple outlets in one location because that stopped them from trying to turn a profit with economies of scale.

On the other side, you have a nonprofit group arguing that these old rules preserve diversity of ownership, which is in and of itself a public good that the FCC must protect.

The Third Circuit sided with the

...