President Ronald Reagan’s name has been taken in vain a lot lately by conservatives eager to use his sainted persona to bash President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The worst offender has been Newsmax and its CEO, Chris Ruddy, a well-known figure who tries to mask his opposition to free-market principles by invoking Reagan as his inspiration and imprimatur.

Over and over again, Newsmax and Ruddy have cited Reagan in opposing proposed FCC reforms that would lift regulatory restrictions on television station ownership. In an alert to Newsmax readers this week, the channel wrote, “The Cap is a policy originally started by President Ronald Reagan to prevent massive TV media consolidation. . . . Reagan understood immediately the danger of big media. Now, Chairman Carr and the FCC want to abolish Reagan’s cap entirely.”

Newsmax has also reported this not just as its corporate view but as a news fact, saying in a recent report: “The cap was first instituted by then-President Ronald Reagan to limit major networks and station groups from owning a majority of stations across the nation.”

Newsmax has said this not only to its viewers, but to the FCC itself, asserting in a recent filing that “the national cap [is] good policy rooted in conservative values and decisions by the Reagan Administration.”

That’s not really true.

Though it is correct that the first percentage cap was instituted in 1985 by Reagan appointees on the FCC, this was actually a deregulatory move that provided relief from the previous hard cap of seven television stations, set for the first time in 1954 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1956.

In 1984, President Reagan’s FCC appointees moved to totally repeal that national ownership cap. The Commission adopted a “phase out” such that “at the end of six years, multiple ownership would be unrestricted.”

After the Democrat-controlled Congress pushed back, the FCC compromised by creating a new rule limiting any single television company from reaching more than 25 percent of the nation’s viewers via their local station licenses (of course, the national networks themselves—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS—could reach 100 percent of viewers, but this never seemed a problem for liberals—only local station owners are subject to caps). Though the 25 percent national audience limit was still a cap, it marked significant freedom for corporate growth compared to the prior hard cap at just seven stations.

Reagan’s FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who started as an aide on the 1980 Reagan campaign, explained at the time that the initial effort to entirely lift the cap was a deregulatory move to open up a free market for station ownership: “Broadcasting will then be able to rejoin the family of American businesses under the general laws that regulate competition, no longer arbitrarily singled out for straight-jacket treatment.”

He predicted that if television companies owned stations in multiple markets, that would actually result in “more program competition, on a local and national basis. While there is no magic in group ownership that ensures better service, the sharing of costs that can go on among more stations is likely to permit larger-scale program undertakings.”

Fowler’s point—that larger station groups can actually increase competition by conferring the scale necessary to independently produce widespread programming—is what conservatives should want instead of total dependence on networks like ABC and NBC. The growth of shows like Sinclair’s The National Desk as an alternative to network news is a great example of Fowler’s vision in action.

Newsmax says “Reagan understood immediately the danger of big media,” but in fact his FCC specifically called out the Left’s scare tactics against “big media.”

Fowler wrote in his opinion on lifting the ownership cap: “Bigness is not necessarily badness, sometimes it is goodness, sometimes it is just bigness and nothing more. But without a good reason to forbid growth, this Commission should not just utter the magic word ‘Television’ and treat the industry differently.”

Just so, there is nothing inherently wrong with corporations that provide services customers want, leading to their market growth, as long as they don’t employ unlawful anticompetitive tactics.

Reagan was a champion for free markets and economic growth. His eight years marked a renewal of the national economy, achieved largely through tax cuts and regulatory relief. His FCC pursued the same goals by providing greater freedom for broadcasting companies to grow and thrive. President Trump’s FCC should pursue the same policy and brush aside the mistaken invocation of the Gipper.

Daniel Suhr is president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative public interest law firm.