The Incoming FCC Chief Is No 'Warrior for Free Speech'

Brendan Carr is prepared to block a merger because he doesn't approve of minor CBS editorial decisions.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office next week, and his second-term agenda is taking shape as he fills out his administration. One of the first hires announced after the November election was the elevation of Brendan Carr, who sits on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to be the agency's new head.

Trump dubbed Carr "a warrior for free speech," and in response, Carr pledged to "dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans." But Carr appears all too willing to wield the federal censorship apparatus on Trump's behalf.

Over the weekend, Charles Gasparino reported in the New York Post that Carr is unlikely to quickly approve a proposed merger between Paramount Global—the media conglomerate whose assets include the Paramount Pictures film studio as well as the broadcast network CBS and its CBS News division—and Skydance Media, which produced recent hit films like Top Gun: Maverick and entries in the Mission: Impossible series.

"Carr has told them a quick and clean approval is not on the table," a source told Gasparino, "and all else remains on the table including an eventual approval or a denial." (An FCC spokesperson did not respond to Reason's request for comment by press time.)

Paramount agreed to Skydance's terms in July 2024, in a deal valued at $8 billion. At the time, the Associated Press reported the merger would provide Paramount, "a legacy studio that has struggled to adapt to a shifting entertainment landscape," with "desperately needed cash."

But mergers of that size bring considerable scrutiny from federal agencies.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has broad authority to review mergers and acquisitions by certain private companies, in part to prevent "unfair methods of competition." The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division also enforces antitrust law in sectors the FTC doesn't, like the telecommunications industry. Rounding out this regulatory Venn diagram is the FCC, which shares authority with the DOJ to review telecom mergers and acquisitions—but while the DOJ reviews deals through the lens of competition, the FCC examines "whether 'the public interest, convenience, and necessity' would be served" by approving the merger.

The proposed merger requires FCC approval since Paramount owns CBS, and broadcast networks are under the agency's purview. Carr has signaled his intention to slow-walk the process.

"There's…a news distortion complaint at the FCC still, having to do with CBS, and CBS has a transaction before the FCC," Carr told Fox News' Dana Perino in November. "And I'm pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the CBS 60 Minutes transcript is something that's likely to arise in the context of the FCC's review of that transaction."

Carr referred to a controversy among conservatives that CBS edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes so as to make her meandering answer to a question about Israel seem slightly more coherent. The Center for American Rights filed a complaint charging that CBS' edit constituted "news distortion," a violation of FCC rules. (Notably, the agency's authority to police news distortion is limited by the First Amendment. "Broadcasters are only subject to enforcement if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report," per the FCC's website. "Expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable.")

Rep. Troy Nehls (R–Texas) called the edit "the biggest scandal in broadcast history." To be clear, it's not. In fact, during the campaign, plenty of commentators on the political left denigrated the mainstream media for "sanewashing," taking Trump's rambling and disjointed public speeches and distilling them down to lucid snippets of information. It's not clear what differentiates CBS adjusting Harris' answer about Israel from CNN, for example, ignoring Trump's rant about sharks being electrocuted by battery-powered boats and merely writing up his proposal to no longer tax tipped wages.

But the 60 Minutes interview so vexed Trump that he filed a meritless lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from CBS and called for the FCC to "take away the CBS [broadcast] license." (CBS itself is not licensed by the FCC, nor is CBS News, though individual CBS affiliate stations are. The Center for American Rights, for example, filed its complaint against WCBS, the network affiliate in New York City.)

Carr has suggested the CBS complaint could hold up Paramount's merger with Skydance, as if one editorial decision by 60 Minutes—a single show aired on a Paramount subsidiary—weighs heavily on the company as a whole.

When Harris briefly appeared on Saturday Night Live the weekend before the election, Carr also told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that the FCC should investigate NBC's potential violation of the federal "equal time" rule and that "we need to keep every single remedy on the table," up to and including "license revocation." (Like CBS, NBC does not have a license, though the individual affiliate stations that broadcast NBC's content do.)

Supporters of free markets often criticized Lina Khan, President Joe Biden's pick to head the FTC, for her overly aggressive interpretation of the agency's antitrust authority. Khan pursued actions "concerned with an abstract promotion of competition—a fixation leading to the conviction that businesses getting too big, successful, or dominant was itself something to be feared and stopped," Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in November. "Proving actual harm to consumers was out; proving that practices harmed a big business' competitors was the new game. But under these rules, doing anything that successful businesses do—including innovating, bundling products for improved efficiency, and acquiring new products—could be considered part of an antitrust law violation."

With the November election, conservatives cheered that Khan would soon be out the door. How ironic it is, then, that Trump's chosen successor is himself keen on weaponizing the federal government to settle petty grievances.