Over the weekend, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed FCC chair, scored another win in an area he seems to believe is a key part of his job: rage-baiting the libs.
Carr on Saturday posted a message on X that he knew would stir outrage on the left. He strongly implied the FCC would not renew licenses of broadcasters that perpetrated “hoaxes and news distortions” in their coverage of the Trump administration’s Iran war. Carr quoted Trump’s complaint about media reports that five U.S. Air Force plans were struck and damaged at a base in Saudi Arabia by an Iranian missile strike.
“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — also known as the fake news — have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote on March 14. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”
Carr continued: “And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters. The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves. It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.”
Never mind that the news about the five damaged Air Force planes was first reported by the Wall Street Journal — a news outlet the FCC has no jurisdiction over. Forget for a moment that the FCC does not regulate national TV networks or their news programming: The agency has the narrow authority to license local broadcast stations. Also, disregard the reality that any charge the FCC lodged against a local broadcast company about alleged “news distortion” would be tied up in bureaucratic proceedings for months or even years — before it even reached a court, where it would be presumably vigorously challenged, as explained in this CNN article.
Meanwhile, the FCC’s “news distortion” rule is inarguably outdated. It was first adopted in 1949, when broadcast radio and TV were dominant gatekeepers in the distribution of news. Today, that is certainly not the case. And “broadcast” networks today are multiplatform publishers — whatever they publish and stream on the internet is not even under the FCC’s direct authority. (Note that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” released its interview with Texas State Rep. James Talarico on YouTube after CBS didn’t broadcast it on local TV airwaves because the network’s lawyers feared retribution from Carr’s FCC over the “equal time” rule — resulting in the Talarico interview receiving massive views.)
So why is Carr, who knows all of this, putting forth a straw-man argument threatening unspecified broadcasters about unspecified “fake news” reports, as determined by Carr’s perception of what that means?
Carr is doing this kind of saber-rattling, even if it amounts to empty threats, to provoke those on the left into frothy outrage over government censorship — and thereby reinforce the narrative that he and the FCC are doing their job to reshape media coverage in a way that discourages what the MAGA-sphere sees as left-wing bias. Carr revels in the characterization that he is Trump’s “attack dog” against the media.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was among those who took Carr’s bait. “Constitutional law 101: it’s illegal for the government to censor free speech it just doesn’t like about Trump’s Iran war. This threat is straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” she wrote Saturday on X.
In response, Carr again adopted the posture that he’s not censoring anybody and that he isn’t against free speech — he’s just against “fake news,” and he’s just doing his job to hold spectrum licensees accountable to the “public interest” standard. Carr, replying to Warren, wrote, “No one has a First Amendment right to a license or to monopolize a radio frequency; to deny a station license because ‘the public interest’ requires it ‘is not a denial of free speech,’” citing a Supreme Court decision quoting its 1943 ruling in NBC v. United States. Is broadcasting news that five U.S. planes were damaged by an Iranian attack against “the public interest”? Carr suggests that it is.
“The Left Explodes after Carr Warns Broadcasters about ‘Hoaxes and News Distortions,’” says the headline on the Monday edition of Policyband, penned by longtime D.C. communications policy watcher Ted Hearn. Undoubtedly, this is just the sort of things Carr was hoping for.
Of course, it’s another case of a Trump appointee catering to an audience of one: Donald Trump.
Trump, in a post Sunday on Truth Social, gave an atta-boy to Carr about the FCC chairman’s threat to rescind the licenses of “fake news” broadcasters — and for good measure he threw in a jab at another favorite target, late-night TV hosts.
“I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations,” Trump wrote. “They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED.’”
Trump claimed that “The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies.” (The Journal did not report that the planes were “struck down”; it said they were “struck and damaged.”)
Trump also alleged that “Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media,” produced and distributed AI-generated imagery showing the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier “burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that!” Trump didn’t indicate which news outlets were allegedly guilty of falsely reporting that; it is unclear whether any U.S. outlet did report that the carrier had been hit as initially suggested by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy. But, Trump said, “those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!”
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