In the blizzard of executive orders, Resolute desk pronouncements and mass firings of President Donald Trump‘s first weeks in office, it’s easy to lose sight of what has been happening at the FCC and its chilling effect on the media.
The agency typically gets few headlines, engaged as it is in policy calls over arcane topics like spectrum allocation. But as the chief regulator with oversight over broadcasting, the FCC wields authority over media companies large and small, and that is where its Trump-appointed chairman Brendan Carr has sought to rattle the industry in his initial month.
Just this past week, Carr announced an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of Comcast and NBCUniversal, and vowed that other media companies would face the same scrutiny. He targeted PBS and NPR for their underwriting practices, while warning that their government funding would be in the crosshairs of congressional Republicans. He launched an inquiry into KCBS-AM radio station’s coverage of a San Jose immigration raid, stepping into a story at the heart of Trump’s agenda.
Watch on Deadline
Most prominently, Carr has gone after CBS, demanding that journalistic powerhouse 60 Minutes produce an unedited transcript of their interview with Kamala Harris. Carr’s inquiry was based on a complaint filed by a conservative group, claiming a violation of the FCC’s “news distortion” policy. When the network produced the transcript, showing that its editing was not out of the industry norm and arguing that it was not deceptive, Carr didn’t dismiss the complaint but sent it off for public comment, delaying any resolution until well into March at the earliest.
Carr’s actions are in line with the Trump administration’s overall effort to threaten or punish the press, at a time when major media outlets are in a period of upheaval. In the case of CBS, the network’s parent company is seeking FCC approval for its acquisition by Skydance, and Carr has made clear that the 60 Minutes complaint likely would be part of the merger review.
That said, the “news distortion” policy is a rarely enforced provision that subjects broadcasters to punishment only “if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report.” But the FCC has long said its authority is narrow, noting that the agency is prohibited from engaging in censorship or infringing on the First Amendment.
“It is unusual for any news distortion complaint to get this far, particularly when it involves a simple editing choice,” said Robert Corn-Revere, former chief counsel to the FCC and a longtime First Amendment litigator.
“I don’t know of any case that rivals this in terms of the weakness of the claim,” said Corn-Revere, who is now with the group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Paradigm shift
Carr’s decision to pursue the complaint also is a contrast to the pushback during Trump’s first term. In 2017, when the president suggested that NBC should lose its license over some of its news content, then-FCC chair Ajit Pai made clear that the agency “under the law, does not have the authority to revoke the license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”
Carr himself affirmed this view when two House Democrats, following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, queried distributors about their decisions to continue carrying Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax. At the time, Carr said that a “newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.”
He also has spoken up before when it comes to specific attacks on the media, even from those who are now Trump allies. In 2022, when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists, Carr told Deadline that although he wasn’t aware of the specifics, “One person should not get to decide who participates in the digital town square.”
Tom Wheeler, who served as FCC chairman during Barack Obama’s second term, said that, in the Trump era, Carr’s strategy seems to be to “attack, attack, attack. Keep [media outlets] on their back foot.”
He noted that Carr’s initiation of investigations are being done by him alone — not by the full commission — and that, in his missives to media outlets, “the verdict is being delivered in the letter.”
“The paradigm has shifted from the FCC having to prove allegations, to the FCC making allegations and CBS having to prove they are wrong,” Wheeler said.
Some have written off some of the criticism of Carr as the alarmism of the center-left media. But the chorus of voices who have sounded warnings includes the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and a former Republican chair of the FCC.
Carr “has decided to put the commission in the business of news censorship,” Al Sikes, FCC chair under President George H.W. Bush, wrote in a recent op-ed. “His actions are akin to becoming a campaign aide to the president,” adding that Carr’s demand for the CBS transcripts showed that he “wants to be the ultimate editor.”
In contrast to some of the fiery figures elsewhere in the Trump administration, led by the president himself, Carr in person is genial, a bit of a contrast to what you’d expect given the swagger on his social media feed. He is a longtime veteran of the FCC, having joined the agency staff in 2012 after working as a private appellate and litigation attorney. He rose to the position of general counsel at the agency, before Trump nominated him to fill a vacancy on the commission in 2017.
“I like Brendan,” Wheeler said. “He is incredibly smart. He is strategically a genius, and he is willing to take risks. I think we are seeing that play out.”
Carr also has been very ambitious. During the Biden administration, as he was in the minority on the commission, he made a name for himself as a social media voice arguing that tech platforms were stifling conservative voices. He appeared not just on business shows but on Newsmax, aligning with the argument of Trump and his allies.
He also seems to relish all the furor over his attacks on the media. “Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” he wrote on X, responding to a story in the Daily Beast.
Even before Trump, just after the election, appointed him chairman, Carr was attacking media bias. Just days before the election, he accused NBC of trying to influence the vote by featuring Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live, claiming they were trying to evade the FCC’s equal time rule. But the next day, the network gave Trump time on its sports programming, and his campaign never really raised hackles over it.
But Carr has pressed ahead. Soon after the inauguration he revived a complaint against NBC over the Harris appearance. He also restored a complaint against ABC over the way that their moderators conducted the September presidential debate between Trump and Harris.
Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, had dismissed those complaints, in addition to the one against 60 Minutes. She warned that the FCC “should not be the president’s speech police.”
Carr has acknowledged the agency’s limits. In an interview with CNBC in December, Carr said that “at the end of the day, obviously there’s a statutory provision that prevents the FCC from engaging in censorship. I don’t want to be the speech police.” But he also rattled the saber, suggesting that broadcast licenses were not “sacred cows” while floating the idea of an FCC rulemaking to determine what the FCC’s “public interest” standard, an ingredient for license holders to meet, actually means. Carr has suggested that there is a role for the FCC in addressing the low trust in the national news media vs. local outlets, something he made clear in a letter to Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger over the power of the company to extract “onerous” concessions in local affiliate negotiations.
“It’s not my decision to hold broadcasters to a public interest obligation,” Carr told CNBC. “It’s Congress. And if they don’t like that, then they should go to Congress to change the law. But my job at the FCC is to enforce the law passed by Congress, and that’s what I intend to do.”
An FCC spokesperson did not respond to requests for Carr to comment.
“Bend the knee”
There is something that can stop Carr’s efforts: the courts. But challenging the FCC’s dictates takes a willingness on the part of CBS, or any other network, and that is something that, so far, they appear unwilling to do.
The National Association of Broadcasters has spoken out on some of Trump’s attacks on the media. In October, president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt said, “The threat from any politician to revoke a broadcast license simply because they disagree with the station’s content undermines this basic freedom.”
But many in the industry are looking at the Trump administration to have a more lenient attitude toward mergers and acquisitions and, more specifically, the relaxation or even repeal of the FCC’s media ownership rules. What lobbyists didn’t expect, however, is the level of sheer ingratiation needed.
On their own, media companies have taken steps to try to appease Trump. ABC settled a Trump defamation lawsuit for $16 million. Amazon purchased a Melania Trump documentary for a reported $40 million. With the merger of CBS parent Paramount Global and Skydance pending, sources say there have been talks with Trump’s team on settling another part of the 60 Minutes brouhaha: The president’s $20 billion lawsuit against the network, arguing that the 60 Minutes edit was so egregious that it interfered with the election, even though Trump won it, and cost his social media platform Truth Social web traffic.
To say the least, the lawsuit is novel, filed under a Texas deceptive trade practices act, something typically used to challenge false advertising. In the eyes of many legal observers and those in the industry, the lawsuit, with a damages amount exceeding the value of Paramount Global as well as the total amount spent in the 2024 election, is frivolous.
In court documents, CBS has defended 60 Minutes as within their First Amendment rights, which official Skydance-Paramount filings have cited the right of the free press to make news judgment. That said, a settlement also is viewed as the price to be paid to get into the president’s good graces. The FCC and Justice Department have yet to give the deal the greenlight, nor is a decision even imminent: The FCC review is still in the middle of an informal, 180-day timeline. And as much as there has been consternation over the 60 Minutes FCC complaint and Trump lawsuit, there is the fact that one of Trump’s allies is Larry Ellison, the father of Skydance’s David Ellison. Trump was profuse with praise for the elder Ellison when he sat on the side at a recent Oval Office event.
Wall Street isn’t sure what to make of Carr, but generally does believe that the Paramount-Skydance deal will ultimately be approved.
“Brandon has been around a long time, and it seems like he’s like a lot of the Republicans: They are acting like kids in a candy store now,” says one analyst.
Another analyst said, “I think it will close. I don’t know that there’s a good anti-concentration reason to block this. Skydance is not big. This is just payback. I just think they want Paramount to bend the knee, and I think Paramount will bend the knee. Because Larry is one of the tech guys and they are all bending the knee. They will do whatever it is they need to do.”
The question is whether that greenlight will come after CBS settles the lawsuit with Trump. That is a disconcerting, even chilling prospect for sources in the news division, who see the legendary house of Murrow and Cronkite as not caught in the middle as controlling Paramount Global shareholder Shari Redstone is anxious to close the transaction. According to The Wall Street Journal, Paramount Global also is weighing whether a settlement may expose directors and officers to liability, including that such a payment could be seen as a bribe.
CBS’ decision to hand over the unedited 60 Minutes transcript was a far cry from more than a half-century ago, when the network was facing similar government pressure amid the controversy over a documentary, The Selling of the Pentagon, an investigation into the Pentagon effort to whip up public support for the Vietnam War.
As veteran industry journalist Harry Jessell recently pointed out in TVNewsCheck, Stanton resisted a congressional demand for outtakes and stared down a congressional committee when it sought to hold him in contempt.
In contrast to that period, as Corn-Revere noted in a recent piece for Columbia Journalism Review, the FCC’s authority over the broadcast industry has waned. At a time of cable, satellite and streaming, it’s much harder to make the case for a “scarcity rationale,” which helped justify broadcast regulations in an era of only three-major networks. A Supreme Court decision last year limited federal agency authority to interpret federal laws. And, Corn-Revere noted, courts have ruled against “jawboning,” or trying to regulate by the use of threats and pressure, or “bullying through unofficial actions.”
Carr, meanwhile, is signaling that there is more to come. Commenting on a report on all of his actions so far against media outlets, he wrote last week on X, “A good start.”
Jill Goldsmith contributed to this report.