Watching ABC undergo Donald Trump over his defamation lawsuit in opposition to 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 in opposition to 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 could not have to pursue that case very diligently, on condition 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. Provided 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, nevertheless it 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 residing daylights out of broadcasters or different media shops in annoying methods,” single some broadcast stations out, and slow-walk purposes 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 major in January, and for ABC to lose its license for “unfair” fact-checking throughout his September debate with Harris.
Vice President Kamala Harris seems on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” with Maya Rudolph, on Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024 in New York.
Although Carr, as a sitting FCC commissioner and former telecommunications lawyer, is aware of full effectively 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.” In some way, in keeping with Carr, this nonetheless warranted FCC investigation, with penalties that would embody revoking NBC’s broadcast licenses.
Placing Carr atop the FCC doesn’t simply enable Trump to assault broadcast networks. Carr has already proven he’s desirous to be Trump’s all-purpose assault canine. Just some days after the 2024 election, Carr wrote to the heads of Alphabet (aka Google), Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, saying these corporations performed a big function in “an unprecedented surge in censorship” by doing issues like fact-checking. His menace to Large Tech was in no way refined, saying that he was assured that when Trump and the brand new Congress take workplace, they’ll take motion to revive First Modification rights—and that such motion might embody a evaluate of firm actions and third-party organizations that Carr additionally thinks have violated the First Modification.
Enjoyable truth: The FCC doesn’t even have jurisdiction over social media platforms or different related net companies. However Carr, who authored the Challenge 2025 chapter on the FCC, is keen to increase the company’s authority and needs to intestine Part 230, which at the moment supplies broad immunity to social networks for materials printed on their web site. Underneath Carr, the FCC would get to determine whether or not social media corporations are moderating “in good faith.”
All you want to learn about Carr’s ideology could 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 put up 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 be very keen to present 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 through the second Trump administration: a weapon for use in opposition to any firm Trump doesn’t like, whether or not the FCC has the authority or not.
As a bonus, it’s additionally doubtless 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 individuals don’t wish to hang around with white nationalists and Nazis.
Certainly, if you’d like a imaginative and prescient of the long run 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 effectively, 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.
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