Watching ABC undergo Donald Trump over his defamation lawsuit towards the community—giving him $15 million for his presidential library and one other $1 million in authorized charges to settle the case—didn’t really feel nice. However there’s extra the place that got here from, and Trump is about to weaponize the federal government to settle his scores with the media.
Trump nonetheless has a lawsuit pending towards CBS, alleging that the community dedicated election interference by deceptively enhancing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look higher. He judge-shopped that case to the Northern District of Texas, the place there’s just one decide, Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, who routinely guidelines in favor of conservatives.
However Trump might not must pursue that case very diligently, provided that he’s bringing in Brendan Carr as head of the Federal Communications Fee. Carr is a present FCC commissioner, and he’s full MAGA. He’s made clear that he sees his job as going after Trump’s enemies. On condition that the FCC controls broadcast licenses, he can hold CBS stations within the crosshairs.
The FCC doesn’t license networks like ABC, CBS, or NBC, but it surely does have authority over broadcast stations owned by the networks. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counsel for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, defined to Ars Technica that the administration can nonetheless use the FCC to “problem the dwelling daylights out of broadcasters or different media shops in annoying methods,” single some broadcast stations out, and slow-walk functions or block mergers.
Trump doesn’t appear to know this and thinks that the networks can simply be worn out. He has known as for CBS to lose its license over October’s “60 Minutes” interview, for NBC and CNN to lose their licenses for not airing his victory speech after the Iowa main in January, and for ABC to lose its license for “unfair” fact-checking throughout his September debate with Harris.
Although Carr, as a sitting FCC commissioner and former telecommunications lawyer, is aware of full properly that the FCC can’t simply yank a community off the air, he nonetheless began complaining concerning the networks even earlier than getting tapped to run the company. After Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live” simply earlier than the election, Carr ran to Fox Enterprise to threaten NBC. His logic? That NBC violated the “equal time” rule by not giving Trump the identical air time. Positive, besides that NBC truly adopted the equal time rule and gave Trump free airtime that weekend throughout a NASCAR race and “Sunday Night Football.” Someway, in keeping with Carr, this nonetheless warranted FCC investigation, with penalties that would embody revoking NBC’s broadcast licenses.
Now that Carr has been supplied the highest job, he’s already stated that he’d not solely contemplate Trump’s laughable grievance towards CBS. He may use it as the premise to dam a merger between Skydance and Paramount, which entails the switch of CBS-owned native stations. Carr informed Fox Information that he was “pretty confident” that Trump’s grievance about “60 Minutes” “is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC’s review of that transaction.” So primarily if Carr finds the “60 Minutes” interview wanting, he’ll use it to mess with CBS on a wholly completely different factor.
Placing Carr atop the FCC doesn’t simply permit Trump to assault broadcast networks. Carr has already proven he’s wanting to be Trump’s all-purpose assault canine. Only a few days after the 2024 election, Carr wrote to the heads of Alphabet (aka Google), Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, saying these corporations performed a major position in “an unprecedented surge in censorship” by doing issues like fact-checking. His risk to Large Tech was in no way refined, saying that he was assured that after Trump and the brand new Congress take workplace, they’ll take motion to revive First Modification rights—and that such motion may embody a overview of firm actions and third-party organizations that Carr additionally thinks have violated the First Modification.
Enjoyable reality: The FCC doesn’t even have jurisdiction over social media platforms or different comparable internet companies. However Carr, who authored the Challenge 2025 chapter on the FCC, is raring to increase the company’s authority and desires to intestine Part 230, which presently gives broad immunity to social networks for materials printed on their website. Beneath Carr, the FCC would get to determine whether or not social media corporations are moderating “in good faith.”
All you have to learn about Carr’s ideology might be gleaned from the omission of 1 social media firm from his threatening letter: X, the cesspool previously generally known as Twitter. Carr loves X. It’s the place he goes to submit about dismantling the “censorship cartel,” to threaten CBS some extra, and to insult the Federal Aviation Affiliation for having the temerity to look at the environmental impression of a proposal by X proprietor Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Carr can also be very keen to offer his pal Musk much more taxpayer {dollars}, complaining that it was “regulatory lawfare against one of the left’s top targets” when the FCC revoked an $885 million grant to Musk’s Starlink when it couldn’t present it could attain sufficient rural properties.
So that is what the FCC will seem like underneath Carr in the course of the second Trump administration: a weapon for use towards any firm Trump doesn’t like, whether or not the FCC has the authority or not.
As a bonus, it’s additionally probably that Carr’s FCC will shovel money towards the world’s richest man, who occurs to run a social media firm that’s hemorrhaging customers as a result of folks don’t wish to hang around with white nationalists and Nazis.
Certainly, if you need a imaginative and prescient of the longer term Carr and Trump crave, it just about would seem like X. Musk, ostensibly a “free speech warrior,” the dumb moniker Trump has utilized to Carr as properly, has suspended accounts of journalists who displease him and sued corporations that reported on the rampant hate speech on the platform.
Musk and Trump have beforehand needed to spend their very own cash to threaten journalists and suppress speech, however underneath Carr, the federal government will do it for them.
