The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to relax a long-standing rule that limits the ability of companies to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same local market.

The proposal, which was challenged in court the last time it came up, was the most contentious piece of updating of the nation’s media ownership rules. Congress requires the FCC to review the rules every four years.

Public interest groups and a departing member of the commission, Michael Copps, expressed concerns that the newspaper-broadcast rule change could cause more consolidation in the media industry, in which round after round of stations have been sold to bigger companies.

“In the vast majority of cases, I do not believe that newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership advances the public interest,” Copps, a Democrat, said in a statement. “It means fewer voices in the community, less localism in the industry, and steep transactional costs that all too often lead to downsized or shuttered newsrooms and fired journalists. Our media, and our public policy, need to head in a different direction.”

The changes to the rule would affect only the 20 most populous markets in the country, where the FCC perceives there to be more competition among media outlets. Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican, suggested that the rule is outdated at a time when people increasingly get news on the unregulated Internet.

“The notion that broadcasters may distribute their content through radio, television, the Internet, mobile devices and other unforeseen portals, but must be prohibited by law from printing the same content on the medium of newsprint, seems anachronistic at best,” McDowell said in a statement.

He suggested that the newspaper-broadcast rule should be loosened further.

Already, companies can and do seek waivers to own both a newspaper and a station in the same market. News Corp., for instance, owns The New York Post and two television stations in the New York City market. Allowing more companies to do so could create new bidders for newspapers, which as a whole have suffered more dramatically than local TV stations in the last decade.

The FCC proposed to leave most of the other rules about TV and radio station ownership in place with minor modifications. It intends to continue to cap the number of television and radio stations that a company can own in a single market. It does, however, intend to remove a rule about the cross-ownership of television and radio stations.

The commission invited suggestions about how to ensure that stations continue to supply local news. A federal study presented to the FCC this year about the state of the media found that TV stations have been decreasing their staffs while increasing their volume of news, potentially hindering the quality of that news.

When the FCC suggested a similar loosening of the newspaper-broadcast rule in 2007, public interest groups and others fought the proposal and succeeded in having it thrown out by a federal appeals court. At the time, the court faulted the commission for not giving the public sufficient time to comment on the proposal.

“The FCC should be working to remedy the mistakes of past administrations — not repeating them,” said Craig Aaron, the chief executive of the media reform group Free Press.