Two decades-old rules – called by policymakers the “main studio rule” and the “UHF discount” – come from different eras of broadcasting, one when the only electronic media was radio and the other from the days before the dominance of cable television. They also come from a different era of government, when policymakers promoted the principle of localism – the belief that local broadcasters should serve their communities. By 1987, it was clear that people didn’t often visit stations, but rather called or sent letters. As a result, the FCC allowed stations to locate their studios anywhere the station’s signal could be clearly received.At the same time, the FCC also removed the rule requiring stations to produce local programming – though they remained able to do so, because they were still required to maintain production and transmission equipment in their studios. In 1998, the FCC let stations move even farther away from their audiences.In April 2017, the FCC proposed doing away with the rule altogether. In its proposal, the FCC noted telephones, email and social media mean listeners don’t need to be physically nearby to communicate with station management.As a result, the FCC said, it was unnecessarily burdensome to force broadcasting companies to maintain local studios even somewhat near the communities they serve. This continues the ongoing policy shift from a focus on connections to the local community, and toward benefiting broadcasters’ business operations and profit margins.That can cause problems, and not just because small communities that used to have local newsrooms may become afterthoughts for reporters and editors in centralized regional hubs. A deadly example happened in January 2002: One person died and a thousand were injured when a freight train derailed, releasing clouds of poisonous gas over Minot, the fourth-largest city in North Dakota. The residents weren’t warned of the danger for hours. Local authorities had technical problems with an automated emergency alert system, and there was no one at the designated radio station to simply cut into the broadcast on a studio microphone and tell listeners what was happening. The second decades-old rule the FCC wants to repeal would complicate matters further by allowing media companies to own even more TV stations across the country.