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A week before he was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr issued an extraordinary letter to the chief executives of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple. Acting in his current capacity, as the agency’s ranking Republican, Carr accused those tech leaders of participating in a “censorship cartel” that included “advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact-checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself.” This cabal, he claimed, was collaborating to block social media posts and marginalize websites in “an apparent effort to suppress their information and viewpoints.”
Beyond Carr’s feverish rhetoric, what made the letter noteworthy was the fact that the FCC does not exercise oversight over social media networks, digital advertisers, or independent fact-checkers such as NewsGuard, a site that Carr singled out with particular scorn, calling it “Orwellian.” Since the FCC’s founding, in the 1930s, the agency’s remit has included communications infrastructure and broadcasters who use public airways. In the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Congress clarified that this mandate includes internet service providers, but did not extend the FCC’s power to determine whether broadcast programming serves the “public interest” in the digital realm. Carr’s letter represented a brazen attempt to broaden its authority.
The discordance between Carr’s public grandstanding and the FCC’s actual powers has continued since his nomination. Early this month, he told Fox News that “combating tech censorship is going to be one of the top priorities for me.” Elsewhere, he’s promised to enforce the public interest requirement on TV and radio stations, through both the review of broadcast licenses and the scrutiny of corporate transactions, such as Skydance’s pending acquisition of Paramount and the attempt by billionaire investor (and conservate bête noire) George Soros to acquire a controlling interest in Audacy, a bankrupt radio conglomerate. All of this follows the scheme Carr laid out in a chapter he wrote on the FCC for Project 2025, the policy blueprint produced by Trump White House alumni. In that chapter, he also mentioned the long-simmering desire of Republicans to loosen the agency’s broadcast ownership rules in order for media empires to amass more stations.
In reality, the legal bureaucracy that cordons the FCC off from the executive branch represents a powerful check on Carr and the commission’s other Trump appointees. When I asked Olivier Sylvain, an administrative law scholar at Fordham University, about Carr’s ambition to regulate content moderation on social media by reinterpreting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, he replied, “You have to explain the agency’s decision to switch from saying you don’t have authority over something to saying you do, given all the steps you have to take when you change a position like that and the scrutiny it’s subject to, never mind the constitutional scrutiny,” he said. “You can’t just act willy-nilly.” (Carr did not respond to requests for comment.)
Between Carr’s extensive to-do list, his visits to Mar-a-Lago, and his regular appearances on conservative cable news, cursory observers may imagine his ascent to the chairmanship of the FCC as a shock-and-awe campaign that will reshape the agency. That’s unlikely to happen. Still, journalists should be wary of the insidious ways in which the FCC’s powers could be selectively wielded against any media company that draws Trump’s ire, regardless of how partisan enforcement of the public interest provision or the agency’s new efforts at rulemaking hold up in court.
The FCC regulation that Carr seems most intent on overturning is the same one that Republican appointees to the commission have been targeting since the George W. Bush administration: the broadcast ownership limitation, which generally bars any one company from owning more than two TV channels or a handful of radio stations in a given media market. In Project 2025, Carr explicitly called for the revision of “the FCC’s media ownership rules, which can have the effect of restricting investment and competition because those regulations assume a far more limited set of competitors for advertising dollars than exist today.”
Carr, who is forty-five—a native of Washington, DC, and a graduate of Georgetown and Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law—has spent nearly his entire adult life in telecommunications law. In 2005, he joined Wiley Rein, a DC firm where he advised telecom clients on the FCC compliance and appeals process. (In 2007, he took a break for a one-year clerkship in the Fourth Circuit under Justice Dennis Shedd, a conservative best known in recent years for his scathing dissent from that court’s ruling against Donald Trump’s ban on immigration from six majority-Muslim nations.) Carr’s tenure at Wiley Rein lasted until 2012, when he jumped from industry to regulator by becoming a staff attorney in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel. Trump named him a commissioner five years later.
During Trump’s first term, the FCC attempted to eliminate the local television rule but was blocked by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals—the same court that stopped the Bush-era FCC from implementing similar rule changes, in 2002 and 2006. This time, the court found that the agency had failed to adequately consider how changing the rule would affect the number of media properties owned by women and minorities. Cheryl Leanza, one of the lawyers who argued against the FCC in the case, told me that “what the FCC had done was make this ridiculous argument that consolidation did not harm ownership diversity, even though the data was completely clear that it did.” Indeed, the judge who authored the Third Circuit’s opinion wrote that “the FCC’s analysis is so insubstantial that it would receive a failing grade in any introductory statistics class.”
Two years later, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling. Justice Brett Kavanaugh acknowledged the insufficiency of the FCC’s analysis but waved it away, writing that, though “the FCC did not have perfect empirical or statistical data” to back up its rule change, that was “not unusual in day-to-day agency decision making.” By then, the FCC was under Democratic control. Given the narrowness of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the commission was able to replace the Trump-era rule with one that essentially left the old system unchanged.
The same legal challenges await if the FCC makes good on another goal Carr laid out in Project 2025: reinterpreting Section 230 to allow for the agency to arbitrate whether the content moderation efforts of social media companies reflect their operating “in good faith,” the standard that currently protects social networks from legal liability for the material they publish. Such a reinterpretation would require the issuance of a new rule, which involves the same process as a rule change. The trouble is, if the jurisdiction of the FCC over something like broadcast ownership is clear, a rule allowing it to wade into Section 230 would be fraught. In a skeptical article on the topic for the Federalist Society, Lawrence J. Spiwak, a telecommunications scholar and the president of a think tank called the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies, noted that “Section 230 itself contains no mention of FCC rulemaking authority to define the bounds of the immunity it provides.” Any attempt to adjust FCC rules would take years to play out.
More pressing is the agency’s ongoing review of Skydance Media’s purchase of Paramount, which includes the transfer of not only CBS and its national news division, but also the broadcast licenses for twenty-eight local CBS stations. New filings in that proceeding mean the FCC is unlikely to complete its review before Trump takes office, leaving the fate of those stations up to a commission controlled by Carr. Last month, he said that conservative grief over how 60 Minutes edited its interview with Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign should be taken into consideration by the FCC, telling Fox News, “I’m pretty confident 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 has also pledged to revisit a recent FCC decision allowing Soros to become the majority shareholder of Audacy and its more than two hundred radio stations. Carr and Nathan Simington, the other Republican appointee to the commission, voted against authorizing the deal. Jessica Rosenworcel, the current chair, issued a statement saying that it followed the same template as seven other media bankruptcy proceedings dating to 2017, which is “designed to facilitate the prompt and orderly emergence from bankruptcy of a company that is a licensee under the Communications Act.” In a Fox Business interview, Carr rejected that logic, describing the decision as a “special, unprecedented commission-level shortcut” that he planned to take a “very hard look at” via a petition filed recently by the Media Research Center, a conservative advocacy group whose stated purpose is “to expose and counter the leftist bias of the national news media.”
The FCC’s decision to approve or deny the transfer of a broadcast license is supposed to be governed by the same standard it uses for the issuance of a license, that the broadcaster is serving “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” There’s ambiguity about what “the public interest” entails, but if a license transfer were to be halted for political reasons, the companies involved would appeal. Regardless of the legality of weaponizing the licensing process, it is alarming to imagine how CBS could be incentivized to soften its coverage of the new Trump administration during a protracted court challenge, while its corporate parent is stuck in debt. “Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” Carr posted recently on X. “These media companies are required by law to operate in the public interest. If they don’t, they are going to be held accountable.”
Outside of these transfer reviews, however, Carr’s power to hold licensees to account will be limited. Local television broadcast licenses are renewed on an eight-year cycle that won’t begin again until 2028; they aren’t subject to politically motivated review. Ironically, one of the only renewals still pending from the most recent round is that of the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia, which the Media and Democracy Project accused of airing “false information about election fraud” during the 2020 election—hardly the type of programming with which the Trump administration is likely to take issue.
“License renewals are an important part of the FCC toolkit,” Leanza told me. “But if they’re done improperly, they can be much more problematic because they’re directed at a single entity, as opposed to adopting rules across the board.” For her, this is the most troubling sign of what the media can expect from Carr’s chairmanship. “Everyone wants the government to stay out of content moderation,” she said, even as “the government does play a really strong role in terms of structuring markets. My concern with Carr is he’s been going more towards an individualized approach and less towards a general, industry-wide approach.”
That individualized approach was on full display in November, when Carr’s letter to the four tech executives took aim at NewsGuard. The company, which is avowedly nonpartisan, issues “reliability ratings” for news outlets and has, for example, given higher marks to the Wall Street Journal than the New York Times and rated MSNBC below Fox News and the Daily Beast. None of that stopped the organization from coming under fire this summer, when, in a Newsmax interview, James Comer, a Republican congressman, called it a “biased left-wing attack dog.” Of note: NewsGuard has said that Newsmax “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalistic standards,” namely by publishing “false or egregiously misleading claims” about matters ranging from the January 6 Capitol insurrection to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, the co-CEOs of NewsGuard, refute Carr and Comer’s characterization of their work. “The reason we’re a good target,” Brill said, “is we’re the only entity that rates the reliability of news and information sites in a completely transparent way,” as opposed to the internal assessments of news sites used by social media companies and digital advertising networks. In his letter, Carr demanded that the four major tech companies provide lists of all of their products and services that make use of NewsGuard data—though Meta and Google have no relationship with the company whatsoever. “It’s really hard to have a cartel with people you’re not even doing business with,” Brill joked. Then he turned serious: “What are we talking about here? Content moderation is better known as editing. That’s what journalists do.”
The idea that the FCC—or any federal agency—would seek to regulate content moderation represents a clear push for government censorship that would nakedly violate the First Amendment. “What if Elon Musk decided to turn X into a conservative social media platform?” Crovitz asked, in a not-so-hypothetical. “Is Brendan Carr saying that that would be censorship and unconstitutional? It’s ridiculous. If Elon Musk wants to do that, he has every constitutional right.”
It may be that Carr’s term as FCC chairman will have less to do with executing structural changes at the agency than fostering an environment of selective “public interest” enforcement that makes media companies and the journalists who work for them second-guess their coverage of the Trump administration. Sylvain, the Fordham legal scholar, said, “I have friends who are general counsels at media companies, and no matter how sketchy the legal theories are that we’re hearing, they’re still nervous because it’s still resources” that have to be spent on legal fees. “That’s part of the strategy, right? It’s to chill people into compliance—obedience beforehand.”
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