In Donald Trump's war to silence media critics he has his junkyard dog: Brendan Carr.
The FCC chair has threatened CBS, NBC, ABC and public broadcasting, charging bias in news coverage, a new role for the commission chair, and assailing their diversity. Carr socializes with Trump and mirrors his anti media agenda. While his actions are short on substance, his bullying tactics may be working, intimidating some corporate owners. The one major broadcasting outlet he has not criticized or is investigating is Fox, the conservative network. Carr says he is simply trying to hold these other media companies accountable. Critics take strong exception. "He is engaged in viewpoint discrimination to please Trump," charges Andrew Schwartzman, a long time consumer advocate and communications lawyer. "His charges are preposterous, lacking any legal basis." Senate and House Democrats have accused him of weaponizing his position at the expense of the First Amendment; they are filing legislation to prevent this. As the minority party this will go nowhere. Three former FCC chairs, one a Republican, have condemned Carr for politically motivated probes of places Trump doesn't like; they too charge this jeopardizes the First Amendment. Carr brushes off these critics as sore losers.
Carr's partisan agenda merged right after he became chair in January. His predecessor had dropped four cases on First Amendment grounds. He went along with the decision to drop a case against Fox, but reinstated the ones against ABC, CBS and NBC. While Carr rails against bias and distortions by media Trump dislikes, he is silent on Fox, which had to settle two huge defamation cases because they lied about the 2020 election. He's also silent on cases brought against two smaller right wing venues, Newsmax and One America. He accused ABC of bias in the Trump-Harris debate they hosted and wrote two blistering letters to Bob Iger, chair of Disney, which owns the network, about ABC and the failure to eliminate their employee diversity policies. He charges public broadcasting, NPR and PBS, are violating underwriting regulations -- they aren't -- and that NPR is politically biased. (My wife works at PBS)
His big investigations are into NBC and CBS, both without merit. He charged NBC may have violated the equal time rules when shortly before the election Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris appeared on "Saturday Night Live." In accordance with the rules, however, NBC offered Trump equal time later. Carr charges the cable channel, MSNBC, has a liberal bias; it does just as Fox has a conservative bias. On CBS, putting on his editor's cap, Carr, echoing Trump, claims a "60 Minutes" interview last fall with Harris was edited to make her look better. The full transcript was released and the charge is wrong. But Paramount, CBS' parent is eager to complete an $8 billion deal with Skydance. Company Chair Shari Redstone, in an effort to placate Carr and Trump, is trying to crack down on 60 Minutes, the number one rated show on television and the gold standard for the network. The executive producer, refusing to buckle to corporate pressure, resigned and correspondent Scott Pelley last weekend took the unusual step of criticizing company executives. None of these cases are really legitimate but that's irrelevant if the intimidation causes capitulation, which in the case of CBS looks likely, as the FCC gas to approve the deal. The chairman, who before he converted to full MAGA was considered a smart, friendly, traditional conservative, also is stacking the FCC staff with right wingers. The General Counsel is Michigan State professor, Adam Candeub, who claimed the January 6 riot was just "a political demonstration to protest a crooked election that got out of control." (The 2020 election, which Trump lost, was of course legitimate.)
Carr defenders use the familiar what about-isms: that FCC always has been steeped in politics. It was polarized by issues like net neutrality of the Internet. "But we've never seen anything like this," says Victor Pickard, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School, who has studied the FCC history. "This is an FCC chair with a singular focus of carrying out revenge against President Trump's perceived enemies."
The most famous FCC chair, Newton Minow, was a confidant of President Kennedy. Minow's 1961 speech assailed television's entertainment fare as a "vast wasteland' which it was. Minow's daughter, Nell, in a recent Atlantic article, noted in that speech the FCC chair vowed there would be no suppression of programming as "censorship strikes at the tap root of our free society."
Carr should read the account when JFK called Minow to bitterly complain about an NBC story telling the FCC chair to "do something." He did nothing and the next day told the White House the "President is lucky to have a friend at the FCC who knew not to pay attention to the President when the President was angry." The article was entitled "How to Say No to the President."
Today there's an FCC chairman eager to please the President to say "Yes sir, whatever you want."
Trump is adult child with an ego
Who every one is affard of. They are all enablers.
The bias i consistently hear and see on main media outlets is for trump and his base. That’s it.