Trump's FCC Chairman threatens broadcast licenses over war propaganda

Brendan Carr participates in a panel discussion at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Key Points

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters their licenses could be at risk over news coverage of the conflict in Iran.
Carr said stations must operate in the public interest and suggested coverage could face scrutiny during license renewals.
Critics say the vague public interest standard could allow regulators to pressure broadcasters over editorial decisions.

The lead official in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has threatened the broadcast licenses of radio and television stations over their coverage of the ongoing military conflict in Iran.

In a series of social media posts over the weekend, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr complained about unspecified “broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions” about the conflict, saying they have a “chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”

“The law is clear: Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” Carr wrote.

The law is actually not clear on the matter — while broadcasters do have a “public interest” obligation to serve their communities of license, the term has never been specifically defined.

The lack of a firm definition on the term “public interest” means the FCC has been left to interpret that obligation on a per-case basis. Historically, the agency has looked at news programming as one way that a broadcast station has served the public interest.

Carr has exploited that situation in the past: Last year, when late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel wrongly implied that a man suspected of shooting political activist Charlie Kirk was aligned with supporters of President Donald Trump, Carr encouraged broadcasters to pre-empt his program. Within hours of his comments, two major media companies — Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair, Inc. — acted on his comments by pulling the show from their ABC affiliates. The broadcasters had pending business-related transactions that required FCC approval.

Carr later tried to wring his hands of the matter, saying both broadcasters who pulled the show were merely acting on their public interest obligations. In response, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said the agency should put a firm definition to the term out of concern that the vagueness of the requirement was allowing Carr to weaponize the requirement.

“I have called for the commission to initiate a rulemaking to define what it means by the public interest,” Gomez said during an appearance at the University of Mississippi last October. “Otherwise, we’re just regulating against what we don’t like, and that is a direct violation of the First Amendment.”

Carr has ignored that call, choosing instead to exploit the lack of a definition to suit his own interests and those of Trump.

Smoke rises from a building in the Iranian capital Tehran following U.S. and Israeli missile strikes against targets there. (Photo by Avash Media)

That played out again over the weekend when Trump criticized newspaper reports about the ongoing conflict in Iran — military action that few Americans support, and which contradicts the president’s own campaign promise to avoid wars with foreign countries.

Frustrated by the media coverage on the matter, Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to complain about how newspapers were reporting on the conflict, including their stories on an Iranian missile strike against five refueling airplanes on a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia.

Carr used the post as an opportunity to threaten broadcasters into falling in line with the administration’s talking points on the war.

“The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s air waves,” Carr said. “It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.”

Carr suggested the agency might scrutinize the news coverage of broadcast stations when their licenses are up for renewal, something that has been tried at least once in the past. Three years ago, a petition was brought to deny a routine license renewal application associated with a Fox-owned TV station in Philadelphia, with a grassroots organization saying the station was too closely aligned with the Fox News Channel, which had settled with a voting machine company over election-related misinformation.

The FCC ultimately rejected the challenge, saying the petition was politically-motivated and that the station had fulfilled its public interest obligations.