FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's Meddling in Broadcast Journalism Contradicts His Own Avowed Views

As a minority FCC member during the Bush administration, Carr condemned government interference with newsroom decisions.

You may have heard that Skydance Media is merging with Paramount, which owns CBS. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved that $8 billion deal last week, its chairman bragged that the agency had extracted concessions that would bring "significant changes" to the network's journalism.

Brendan Carr, a Republican whom President Donald Trump appointed as the FCC's chairman, thinks the agency has a responsibility to ensure that TV journalists cover the news "fully, accurately, and fairly." But that role is precluded by the First Amendment, as Carr himself once seemed to recognize.

Paramount needed the FCC's approval for the merger because it entailed the transfer of broadcast licenses held by CBS-owned stations. The FCC blessed those transfers just a few weeks after Paramount announced that it would pay $16 million to settle a laughable lawsuit in which Trump claimed that CBS had committed consumer fraud by editing a pre-election interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris to make her sound less "dumb."

Although Carr thought that interview justified an investigation of CBS for "broadcast news distortion," he insisted that Trump's lawsuit had nothing to do with the FCC's review of the Paramount/Skydance deal. But the concessions he highlighted in explaining the agency's decision are at least as troubling as the appearance that Paramount paid protection money.

Carr noted that Skydance had promised to "ensure that the new company's programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum." Skydance also said it would "adopt measures" to "root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media" and "enable CBS" to "operate in the public interest" by "focus[ing] on fair, unbiased, and fact-based coverage."

Such government meddling would be obviously unconstitutional in the context of print, cable, satellite, streaming, or online journalism. Broadcasting is treated differently because government licensing and regulation supposedly are necessary to address radio spectrum "scarcity."

That rationale was always dubious, and it makes even less sense in the current media environment. But even the fiction that broadcasting is special in a constitutionally relevant way goes only so far in authorizing regulatory intervention, as the FCC itself concedes.

"The agency is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press," the FCC explains. "Those protected rights include, but are not limited to, a broadcaster's selection and presentation of news or commentary."

Yet it is precisely such decisions that Carr is avowedly trying to shape. That power grab is consistent with his understanding of the government's role in the marketplace of ideas, which he thinks should include restricting the editorial discretion of social media platforms in the name of "reining in Big Tech" and preventing "discrimination against core political viewpoints."

Not long ago, Carr was singing a different tune. As a minority member of the FCC during the Biden administration, he rejected the idea that the agency should "operate as the nation's speech police."

In response to the Biden administration's attempted revival of "net neutrality" rules, Carr declared that "the American people want more freedom on the Internet—not freewheeling micromanagement by government bureaucrats." When Democrats urged the FCC to reject the transfer of a Miami radio license because they objected to the new owner's ideology, Carr said the agency should not be "using our regulatory process to censor political opinions."

Carr had a similar take when two Democratic lawmakers pressured cable companies and streaming services to stop carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network, which they described as leading sources of "misinformation." He rightly condemned that "chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys," saying "a newsroom's decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official."

Now that Carr is running the FCC, it's clear that the principles he defended included unspoken political exceptions. In other words, they were not principles at all.

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