brendan carr

FCC chair calls Paramount/WBD merger “a lot cleaner” than defunct Netflix deal

brendan carr, Paramount Skydance, Policy, warner bros. discovery / Mike M. / March 3, 2026

FCC to review foreign debt, but Carr indicates it will be a formality.

Credit: Getty Images | Kenneth Cheung

Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has a notable supporter in Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. The FCC boss told CNBC today that the Paramount/WBD combination “is a lot cleaner” than the now-defunct Netflix deal to buy WBD.

Netflix “would have had a very difficult path forward from a regulatory perspective” because of “the scope and scale” of the streaming service that would have been created by combining Netflix with WBD property HBO Max, Carr said. There were “a lot of concerns in DC” about Netflix buying the company, he said.

Netflix backed out of its deal with Warner Bros. instead of matching the Paramount offer. Although Paramount plans to merge its own Paramount+ streaming service with HBO Max, Carr said the Paramount/WBD merger “does not raise at all the same types of concerns [as Netflix]. I think there’s some real consumer benefits that could emerge from it.”

Paramount Skydance is led by CEO David Ellison. His father, Larry Ellison, pledged $40 billion toward the deal. The Ellisons seem to have won President Trump’s backing for the merger.

The FCC plays a big role in reviewing mergers when broadcast licenses are transferred from one entity to another. There are no license transfers in this case because WBD doesn’t own any TV broadcast licenses.

But Paramount Skydance must comply with the FCC’s foreign ownership rules because it is already an FCC licensee with 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is apparently financing the WBD purchase partly with money from foreign investors, which could trigger an FCC review of whether a foreign entity would gain control of a broadcaster.

Sovereign wealth funds back Paramount

In December, Paramount said that it lined up “an aggregate $24 billion commitment from three sovereign wealth funds” from Gulf countries, specifically Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Paramount said at the time that the sovereign wealth funds “agreed to forgo all governance rights (including board representation).”

Carr told the Financial Times yesterday that an FCC review of foreign debt is unlikely to hold up the merger. “All the information that I’ve seen about that foreign debt … is that would qualify under FCC rules as what we call bona fide debt, meaning it would be a very quick, almost pro forma review,” he said. FCC precedents state that bona fide debt may include a guarantee for a loan or a standard loan in which the creditor does not possess an ownership or voting interest in the licensee.

Carr told CNBC that the deal will be reviewed by the Justice Department, and that “if there’s any FCC role at all, it will be a pretty minimal role. I think this is a good deal and I think it should get through pretty quickly.”

The Justice Department is reviewing the merger and is not likely to try to block it, Bloomberg reported. “The agency is taking a softer stance on merger enforcement and hasn’t blocked a deal on antitrust grounds since President Donald Trump took office,” the article said. The deal would still face review by individual US states and regulators in other countries.

Paramount was cagey yesterday about whether sovereign funds are still backing the deal. “In government filings and on an investor call Monday, Paramount reiterated that the Ellisons and private-equity firm RedBird Capital Partners have pledged $47 billion toward the roughly $81 billion Paramount will pay to buy out WBD shareholders,” Business Insider wrote. “The rest will be financed with debt. But Paramount doesn’t say how much the Ellisons and RedBird intend to cough up themselves, and how much will come from other investors.”

Foreign ownership rule

Section 310 of the Communications Act imposes foreign ownership limits of 20 or 25 percent, depending on how the US-based licensee is structured. If the Paramount/WBD deal creates what’s called an “attributable interest” in the entity that holds FCC licenses, the merging companies would need to obtain a waiver, said Harold Feld, a telecom and media lawyer who is senior VP of advocacy group Public Knowledge.

If they’re “changing the corporate structure so that the foreign owners have what the FCC classifies as an attributable interest in the licenses, that would be a change of ownership under the FCC’s rules and would require FCC approval,” Feld told Ars. But if the foreign investment is only a passive interest with no real control over the company, it usually gets a rubber stamp without a difficult review, he said.

Carr’s statement to the Financial Times indicates that it will be a formality. Feld said that “it’s hard to tell whether [Carr] is saying that because the [Trump] administration approves the merger or whether he’s saying that because he’s actually been briefed by the buyers on the nature of the ownership change.”

Paramount has already been talking to regulators about getting the WBD deal approved. Paramount said it made “significant regulatory progress” before signing the deal with WBD and that there are “no statutory impediments to close in [the] US.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other Democratic lawmakers alleged in a letter that “the entire process has been clouded by corruption concerns.” The letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said it appears that Trump administration officials discouraged Netflix’s bid in closed-door meetings “so that Paramount Skydance, the bidder reportedly favored by President Trump, could take over Warner Bros. instead.”

Since Warner Bros. properties like HBO Max and CNN offer programming outside the US, other countries’ regulators could try to block the merger. Paramount has started discussions with the European Commission, the firm said.

Paramount gave in to Trump and FCC demands

Trump and Carr have repeatedly criticized TV networks, including Paramount property CBS, for alleged bias. Paramount became the federal government’s preferred buyer of Warner Bros. after multiple instances in which the company acceded to Trump and FCC demands.

Trump sued Paramount because he didn’t like how CBS edited a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris and obtained a $16 million settlement from the company. Trump described the deal as “another in a long line of VICTORIES over the Fake News Media.”

The Paramount/Trump settlement was followed quickly by the FCC approving Paramount’s $8 billion purchase of Skydance in July 2025. To get the merger approval, Paramount agreed to install an ombudsman that Carr described as a “bias monitor.” Carr now appears to be happy with Paramount and CBS management, saying that CBS is “doing a great job” under Ellison and CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss.

Carr also seemed pleased with how CBS complied with his demand that late-night shows follow the equal-time rule, after an incident in which host Stephen Colbert alleged that he wasn’t allowed to air an interview with a Democratic politician. Talk shows have historically been exempted from the rule’s requirements, but CBS said it gave Colbert legal guidance on how the planned interview could trigger the equal-time rule after the Carr-led FCC issued a warning to TV broadcasters.

Although the Trump administration appears likely to green-light the Paramount/WBD deal, state governments may not be so quick to approve it. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, “Paramount/Warner Bros is not a done deal. These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny — the California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

FCC chair calls Paramount/WBD merger “a lot cleaner” than defunct Netflix deal Read More »

Trump FCC’s equal-time crackdown doesn’t apply equally—or at all—to talk radio

brendan carr, Equal Time Rule, FCC, Features, Policy, Stephen Colbert, Trump / Kris Guyer / March 2, 2026

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s unequal enforcement of the equal-time rule.

James Talarico and Stephen Colbert on the set of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Credit: Getty Images

In the Trump FCC’s latest series of attacks on TV broadcasters, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been threatening to enforce the equal-time rule on daytime and late-night talk shows. The interview portions of talk shows have historically been exempt from equal-time regulations, but Carr has a habit of interpreting FCC rules in novel ways to target networks disfavored by President Trump.

Critics of Carr point out that his threats of equal-time enforcement apply unequally since he hasn’t directed them at talk radio, which is predominantly conservative. Given the similarities between interviews on TV and radio shows, Carr has been asked to explain why he issued an equal-time enforcement warning to TV but not radio broadcasters.

Carr’s responses to the talk radio questions have been vague, even as he tangled with Late Show host Stephen Colbert and launched an investigation into ABC’s The View over its interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. In a press conference after the FCC’s February 18 meeting, Deadline reporter Ted Johnson asked Carr why he has not expressed “the same concern about broadcast talk radio as broadcast TV talk shows.”

The Deadline reporter pointed out that “Sean Hannity’s show featured Ken Paxton in December.” Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is running for a US Senate seat in this year’s election. Carr claimed in response that TV broadcasters have been “misreading” FCC precedents while talk radio shows have not been.

“It appeared that programmers were either overreading or misreading some of the case law on the equal-time rule as it applies to broadcast TV,” Carr replied. “We haven’t seen the same issues on the radio side, but the equal-time rule is going to apply to broadcast across the board, and we’ll take a look at anything that arises at the end of the day.”

Carr’s radio claim “a bunch of nonsense”

Carr didn’t provide any specifics to support his claim that radio programmers have interpreted precedents correctly while TV programmers have not. The most obvious explanation for the disparate treatment is that Carr isn’t targeting conservative talk radio because he’s primarily interested in stifling critics of Trump. Carr has consistently used his authority to fight Trump’s battles against the media, particularly TV broadcasters, and backed Trump’s declaration that historically independent agencies like the FCC are no longer independent from the White House.

Carr’s claim that TV but not radio broadcasters have misread FCC precedents is “a bunch of nonsense,” said Gigi Sohn, a longtime lawyer and consumer advocate who served as counselor to then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama era. Carr “was responding to criticism from people like Sean Hannity that the guidance would apply to conservative talk radio just as much as it would to so-called ‘liberal’ TV,” Sohn told Ars. “It doesn’t matter whether a broadcaster is a radio broadcaster or a TV broadcaster, the Equal Opportunities law and however the FCC implements it must apply to both equally.”

Sean Hannity during a Fox News Channel program on October 30, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Hannity, who hosts a Fox News show and a nationally syndicated radio show, pushed back against content regulation shortly after Carr’s FCC issued the equal-time warning to TV broadcasters in January. “Talk radio is successful because people are smart and understand we are the antidote to corrupt and abusively biased left wing legacy media,” Hannity said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “We need less government regulation and more freedom. Let the American people decide where to get their information from without any government interference.”

Carr’s claim of misreadings relates to the bona fide news exceptions to the equal-time rule, which is codified under US law as the Equal Opportunities Requirement. The rule requires that when a station gives time to one political candidate, it must provide comparable time and placement to an opposing candidate if an opposing candidate makes a request.

But when a political candidate appears on a bona fide newscast or bona fide news interview, a broadcaster does not have to make equal time available to opposing candidates. The exception also applies to news documentaries and on-the-spot coverage of news events.

Equal time didn’t apply to Jay Leno or Howard Stern

In the decades before Trump appointed Carr to the FCC chairmanship, the commission consistently applied bona fide exemptions to talk shows that interview political candidates. Phil Donahue’s show won a notable exemption in 1984, and over the ensuing 22 years, the FCC exempted shows hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Bill Maher, and Jay Leno. On the radio side, Howard Stern won a bona fide news exemption in 2003.

Despite the seemingly well-settled precedents, the FCC’s Media Bureau said in a January 21 public notice that the agency’s previous decisions do not “mean that the interview portion of all arguably similar entertainment programs—whether late night or daytime—are exempted from the section 315 equal opportunities requirement under a bona fide news exemption… these decisions are fact-specific and the exemptions are limited to the program that was the subject of the request.”

The Carr FCC warned that a program “motivated by partisan purposes… would not be entitled to an exemption under longstanding FCC precedent.” But if late-night show hosts are “motivated by partisan purposes,” what about conservative talk radio hosts? Back in 2017, Hannity described himself as “an advocacy journalist.” In previous years, he said he’s not a journalist at all.

“Remember when Sean Hannity used to claim he wasn’t a journalist, then claimed to be an ‘advocacy journalist’?” Harold Feld, a longtime telecom lawyer and senior VP of advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars. “Given that the Media Bureau guidance leans heavily into the question of whether the motivation is ‘for partisan purposes’ or ‘designed for the specific advantage of a candidate,’ it would seem that conservative talk radio is rather explicitly a problem under this guidance.”

“To put it bluntly, Carr’s explanation that shows that Trump has expressly disliked are ‘misreading’ the law, while conservative radio shows are not, strains credulity,” Feld said.

Conservative radio boomed after FCC ditched Fairness Doctrine

Conservative talk radio benefited from the FCC’s long-term shift away from regulating TV and radio content. A major change came in 1987 when the FCC decided to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, a decision that helped fuel the late Rush Limbaugh’s success.

FCC regulation of broadcast content through the Fairness Doctrine had been upheld in 1969 by the Supreme Court in the Red Lion Broadcasting decision, which said broadcasters had special obligations because of the scarcity of radio frequencies. But the Reagan-era FCC decided 18 years later that the scarcity rationale “no longer justifies a different standard of First Amendment review for the electronic press” in “the vastly transformed, diverse market that exists today.” The FCC made that decision after an appeals court ruled that the FCC acted arbitrarily and capriciously in its enforcement of the doctrine against a TV station.

Even where the FCC didn’t eliminate content-based rules, it reduced enforcement. But after decades of the FCC scaling back enforcement of content-based regulations, Donald Trump was elected president.

Trump’s first FCC chair, Ajit Pai, rejected Trump’s demands to revoke station licenses over content that Trump claimed was biased against him. Pai and his successor, Biden-era FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, agreed that the First Amendment prohibits the FCC from revoking station licenses simply because the president doesn’t like a network’s news content.

After winning a second term, Trump promoted Carr to the chairmanship. Carr, an unabashed admirer of Trump, has said in interviews that “President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape” and that “President Trump ran directly at the legacy mainstream media, and he smashed a facade that they’re the gatekeepers of truth.” Carr describes Trump as “the political colossus of modern times.”

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr standing next to and speaking to Donald Trump, who is wearing a — President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell

Carr has led the charge in Trump’s war against the media by repeatedly threatening to revoke licenses under the FCC’s rarely enforced news distortion policy. Carr’s aggressive stance, particularly in his attacks on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, even alarmed prominent Republicans such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Cruz said that trying to dictate what the media can say during Trump’s presidency will come back to haunt Republicans in future Democratic administrations.

With both the news distortion policy and equal-time rule, Carr hasn’t formally imposed any punishment. But his threats have an effect. Kimmel was temporarily suspended, CBS owner Paramount agreed to install what Carr called a “bias monitor” in exchange for a merger approval, and Texas-based ABC affiliates have filed equal-time notices with the FCC as a result of Carr’s threats against The View.

Colbert said on his show that CBS forbade him from interviewing Talarico because of Carr’s equal-time threats. CBS denied prohibiting the interview but acknowledged giving Colbert “legal guidance,” and Carr claimed that Colbert lied about the incident.

Colbert did not put his interview with Talarico on his broadcast show but released it on YouTube, where it racked up nearly 9 million views. “Only a handful of people would’ve seen it if it had run live,” Christopher Terry, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, told Ars. “But what is it up to, 8 million views on YouTube now? It’s like the biggest thing, everybody in the world’s talking about it now. CBS gave Talarico the best press they ever could have by not letting him on the air… Oldest lesson in the First Amendment handbook, the more you try to suppress speech, the more powerful you make it.”

FCC misread its own rules, Feld says

Feld said the Carr FCC’s public notice “misreads the law and ignores inconvenient precedent.” The notice describes the equal-time rule as a public-interest obligation for broadcasters that have licenses to use spectrum, and Carr has repeatedly said the rule is only for licensed broadcasters. But Feld said the rule also applies to cable channels, which are referred to as community antenna television systems in the Equal Opportunities law as written by Congress.

Moreover, Feld said the FCC guidance “conflates two separate statutory exemptions,” the bona fide newscast exemption and the bona fide news interview exemption. FCC precedents didn’t find that Howard Stern and Jerry Springer were doing newscasts but that their interviews “met the criteria for a bona fide news interview,” Feld said. Despite that, the Carr FCC’s “guidance appears to require that Late Night Shows must be news shows, not merely host an interview segment,” he said.

The FCC guidance describes the Jay Leno decision as an outlier that was “contrary” to a 1960 decision involving Jack Paar and “the first time that such a finding had been applied to a late night talk show, which is primarily an entertainment offering.”

Feld pointed out that Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher was the first late-night show to receive the exemption in 1999, seven years before Leno. Maher’s show was on ABC at the time. The FCC guidance also “fails to explain any meaningful difference” between late-night shows and afternoon shows like Jerry Springer’s, Feld said.

Carr may label TV hosts as “partisan political actors”

At the February 18 press conference, Johnson asked Carr to explain how the FCC is “assessing whether a candidate appearance on a talk show is motivated by partisan purposes.” The reporter asked if there were specific criteria, like a talk show host giving money to a political candidate or hosting a fundraiser.

“Yeah it’s possible, all of that could be relevant,” Carr said. Whether a program is “animated by a partisan political motivation” can be determined “through discovery,” and “people can come forward with their own showings in a petition for a declaratory ruling, but this is something that will be explored,” Carr said. “It’s part of the FCC’s case law, and the idea is that if you’re a partisan political actor under the case law, then you’re likely not going to qualify under the bona fide news exception. That’s OK, it just means you have to either provide equal airtime to the different candidates or there’s different ways you can get your message out through streaming services and other means for which the equal-time rule doesn’t apply.”

In a follow-up question, Johnson asked, “A partisan political actor would mean a talk show host or someone whose show it is?” Carr replied, “It could be that, yeah, it could be that.”

Carr confirmed reports that the FCC is investigating The View over the show’s interview with Talarico. “Yes, the FCC has an enforcement action underway on that and we’re taking a look at it,” Carr said at the press conference.

We contacted Carr’s office to ask for specifics about how TV programmers have allegedly misread the FCC’s equal-time precedents. We also asked whether the FCC is concerned that talk radio shows may be misreading the Howard Stern precedent or other rulings related to radio and have not received a response.

Carr targeted SNL on Trump’s behalf

Carr hasn’t been truthful in his statements about the equal-time rule, Terry said. “Carr is just an obnoxious figure who needs attention, and remember he absolutely lied about the NBC/Kamala Harris equal-time thing,” Terry said. Terry was referring to Carr’s November 2024 allegation that when NBC put Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live before the election, it was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”

In fact, NBC gave Trump free airtime during a NASCAR telecast and an NFL post-game show and filed an equal-time notice with the FCC to comply with the rule. Terry filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails that showed Carr discussing NBC’s equal-time notice on November 3, 2024, but Carr reiterated his allegation over a month later despite being aware of the steps NBC took to comply with the rule.

Terry said Carr has taken a similarly dishonest approach with his claim that talk shows don’t qualify for the equal-time exception. “I think it’s like a lot of things Carr says. Just because he says it doesn’t mean it’s true, right? It’s nonsense,” Terry told Ars. “Every precedent suggests that a show like The View or one of the talk shows at night is an interview-based talk show, and that’s what the bona fide news exception was designed to cover.”

Terry said applying Carr’s “partisan purposes” test would likely require “a complete rulemaking proceeding” and would be difficult now that the Supreme Court has limited the authority of federal agencies to interpret ambiguities in US law. But it’s up to broadcasters to stand up to Carr, he said.

“If one broadcaster was like, ‘Oh yeah? Make us,’ he’d lose in court. He would. The precedent is absolutely against this,” Terry said.

Because the bona fide exemptions apply so broadly to TV and radio programs, the equal-time rule has applied primarily to advertising access for the past few decades, Terry said. If a station sells advertising to one candidate, “you have to make equal opportunities available to their opponents at the same price that reaches the same functional amount of audience,” he said.

Terry said he thinks NBC could make a good argument that Saturday Night Live is exempt, but the network has decided that it’s “easier just to provide time” to opposing candidates. Terry, a former radio producer, said, “I worked in talk radio for over 20 years. We never once even thought about equal time outside of advertising.”

Howard Stern precedent ignored

Howard Stern talking in a studio and gesturing with his hands during his radio show. — Howard Stern debuts his show on Sirius Satellite Radio on January 9, 2006, at the network’s studios at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Credit: Getty Images

Feld said the Carr FCC’s guidance “says the exact opposite” of what the FCC’s 2003 ruling on Howard Stern stated “with regard to how this process is supposed to work. The Howard Stern decision expressly states that licensees don’t need to seek permission first.”

The 2003 FCC’s Stern ruling said, “Although we take this action in response to [broadcaster] Infinity’s request, we emphasize that licensees airing programs that meet the statutory news exemption, as clarified in our case law, need not seek formal declaration from the Commission that such programs qualify as news exempt programming under Section 315(a).”

By contrast, the Carr FCC encouraged TV programs and stations “to promptly file a petition for declaratory ruling” if they want “formal assurance” that they are exempt from the equal-time rule. “Importantly, the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” the notice said.

The Lerman Senter law firm said that before the Carr FCC issued its public notice, broadcasters that met the criteria for the bona fide news interview exemption generally did not seek an FCC ruling. Because of the public notice, “stations can no longer rely on FCC precedent as to applicability of the bona fide news interview exemption,” the law firm said. “Only by obtaining a declaratory ruling, in advance, from the FCC can a station be assured that it will not face regulatory action for interviewing a candidate without providing equal opportunities to opposing candidates.”

This is “quite a switch,” Feld said. If this is the new standard, “then conservative talk radio hosts should also be required to affirmatively seek declaratory rulings,” he said.

FCC is “licensing speech”

Berin Szóka, president of think tank TechFreedom, told Ars that “the FCC is effectively creating a system of prior restraints, that is, licensing speech. This is the greatest of all First Amendment problems. What’s worse, the FCC is doing this selectively, discriminating on the basis of speakers.”

TechFreedom has argued that the FCC should repeal the news distortion policy that Carr has embraced, and Szóka is firmly against Carr on equal-time enforcement as well. As Szóka noted, the Supreme Court has made clear that “laws favoring some speakers over others demand strict scrutiny when the legislature’s speaker preference reflects a content preference.”

“That’s exactly what’s happening here,” Szóka said. “Carr is imposing a de facto requirement that TV broadcasters, but not radio broadcasters, must file for prior assessment as to their ‘news’ bona fides.” Ultimately, it means that TV broadcasters “can no longer have political candidates on their shows without offering equal time to all candidates in that race unless they seek prior pre-clearance from the FCC as to whether they qualify as providing bona fide news,” he said.

Carr’s enforcement push was applauded by Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, a group that has supported Trump’s claims of media bias. The group filed bias complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations that were dismissed during the Biden era, but those complaints were revived by Carr in January 2025.

“This major announcement from the FCC should stop one-sided left-wing entertainment shows masquerading as ‘bona fide news,’” Suhr wrote on January 21. “The abuse of the airwaves by ABC & NBC as DNC-TV must end. FCC is restoring respect for the equal time rules enacted by Congress.”

Suhr later argued in the Yale Journal on Regulation that Carr’s approach is consistent with FCC rulings from 1960 to 1980, before the commission started exempting the interview portions of talk shows.

“From 1984 to 2006, conversely, the Commission took a broader view that included less traditional shows,” Suhr wrote. “The Commission suggested a more traditional view in 2008, and again in 2015, each time qualifying a show because it ‘reports news of some area of current events, in a manner similar to more traditional newscasts.’”

But both decisions mentioned by Suhr granted bona fide exemptions and did not upend the precedents that broadcasters continued to rely on until Carr’s public notice. Suhr also argued that the Carr approach is supported by the Supreme Court’s 1969 decision upholding the Fairness Doctrine, although the Reagan-era FCC decided that the court’s 1969 rationale about scarcity of the airwaves could no longer be justified in the modern media market.

Don’t like a show? Change the channel

With the FCC having a 2-1 Republican majority, Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez has been the only member pushing back against Carr. Gomez has also urged big media companies to assert their rights under the First Amendment and reject Carr’s threats.

When asked about Carr threatening TV broadcasters but not radio ones, Gomez told Ars in a statement that “the FCC’s equal-time rules apply equally to television and radio broadcasters. The Communications Act does not vary by platform, and it does not vary by politics. Our responsibility is to apply the law consistently, grounded in statute and precedent, not based on who supports or challenges those in power.”

FCC enforcement in the Trump administration has been “driven by politics rather than principle,” with decisions “shaped by whether a broadcaster is perceived as a critic of this administration,” Gomez said. “That is not how an independent agency operates. The FCC is not in the business of policing media bias, and it is wholly inappropriate to wield its authority selectively for political ends. When enforcement is targeted in this way, it damages the commission’s credibility, undermines confidence that the law is being applied fairly and impartially, and violates the First Amendment.”

Gomez addressed the disparity in enforcement during her press conference after the recent FCC meeting, saying the rules should be applied equally to TV and radio. She also pointed out that viewers and listeners can easily find different programs if one doesn’t suit their tastes.

“There’s plenty of content on radio I’m not particularly fond of, but that’s why I don’t listen to it,” Gomez said. “I have plenty of other outlets I can go to.”

Trump FCC’s equal-time crackdown doesn’t apply equally—or at all—to talk radio Read More »

FCC asks stations for “pro-America” programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance

brendan carr, FCC, Policy / Rejus Almole / February 20, 2026

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a “Pledge America Campaign” that Carr established to support President Trump’s “Salute to America 250” project.

Carr said in a press release that “I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration.” The press release said Carr is asking broadcasters to “air patriotic, pro-America programming in support of America’s 250th birthday.”

Carr gave what he called examples of content that broadcasters can run if they take the pledge. His examples include “starting each broadcast day with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or Pledge of Allegiance”; airing “PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history”; running “segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites”; airing “music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin”; and providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events from US history.

Carr apparently wants this to start now and last until at least July 4. Carr’s press release starts by touting Trump’s Salute to America 250 project and quotes a White House statement that said, “Under the President’s leadership, Task Force 250 has commenced the planning of a full year of festivities to officially launch on Memorial Day, 2025 and continue through July 4, 2026.”

That White House quote cited by the FCC today is nearly a year old, as you might have guessed by the reference to Memorial Day in 2025. More recently, Trump has said he wants the celebration to last throughout 2026. A Trump proclamation last month declared a “yearlong commemoration” of American independence that began on January 1, 2026.

“Voluntary” pledge

Today’s FCC press release said, “Broadcasters can voluntarily choose to indicate their commitment to the Pledge America Campaign and highlight their ongoing and relevant programming to their viewing and listening audiences.” Although it’s described as voluntary, Carr said broadcasters can meet their public interest obligations by taking the pledge. This is notable because Carr has repeatedly threatened to punish broadcast stations for violating the public interest standard.

FCC asks stations for “pro-America” programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance Read More »

Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat

brendan carr, Equal Time Rule, FCC, Policy, Stephen Colbert / Kris Guyer / February 17, 2026

We contacted CBS and its owner Paramount today and have not received a response. CBS denied prohibiting an interview with Talarico in a statement reported by Variety. The CBS statement acknowledged giving “legal guidance” about potential consequences under the equal-time rule, though.

“The Late Show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico,” the statement said. “The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The Late Show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal-time options.”

Colbert put interview on YouTube

Colbert played audio of a recent Carr interview in which the FCC chairman said, “If [Jimmy] Kimmel and Colbert want to continue to do their programming, they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that’s fine.”

Colbert said he “decided to take Brendan Carr’s advice” and interviewed Talarico for a segment posted on his show’s YouTube channel. “The network says I can’t give you a URL or a QR code but I promise you if you go to our YouTube page, you’ll find it,” Colbert said. That interview is available here.

Colbert described the unequal treatment of late-night talk shows and talk radio. “Carr here claims he’s just getting partisanship off the airwaves but the FCC is also in charge of regulating radio broadcasts. And what would you know, Brendan Carr says right-wing talk radio isn’t a target of the FCC’s equal time notice,” Colbert said.

Colbert said that a mere threat, and not an actual rule change, caused CBS to forbid him from interviewing a candidate. “At this point, he’s just released a letter that says he’s thinking about doing away with the exception for late night, he hasn’t done away with it yet,” Colbert said. “But my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. But I want to assure you this decision is for purely financial reasons.”

Colbert pushed out after “big fat bribe” comment

Colbert’s tenure as host is scheduled to end in May. CBS announced it would end the show last year after Colbert called CBS owner Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump “a big fat bribe.” Paramount subsequently won FCC approval of an $8 billion merger with Skydance, while agreeing to Carr’s demand to install a “bias monitor.”

FCC Democrat Anna Gomez said today that CBS forbidding the interview with Talarico “is yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech. The FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression. CBS is fully protected under the First Amendment to determine what interviews it airs, which makes its decision to yield to political pressure all the more disappointing.”

Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat Read More »

FCC aims to ensure “only living and lawful Americans” get Lifeline benefits

Anna Gomez, brendan carr, California, FCC, Gavin Newsom, Lifeline, Policy / Kris Guyer / January 30, 2026

Carr fires back at California

Carr wrote in his response to Newsom that the FCC Inspector General report “specifically identified the tens of thousands of people that were enrolled AFTER THEY HAD ALREADY DIED.” The Inspector General report wasn’t quite so certain that the number is in the tens of thousands, however.

The report said that “at least 16,774 (and potentially as many as 39,362) deceased individuals were first enrolled and claimed by a provider after they died.” The Inspector General’s office could not determine “whether the remaining 22,588 deceased subscribers were first claimed before or after their deaths as the opt-out states do not report enrollment date information.”

Carr also wrote in his response to Newsom that “payments to providers for people that died or may have died before enrollment went on for over 50 months in cases and for several months on average.” The Inspector General report did say that “providers sought reimbursement for subscribers enrolled after their deaths for 1 to 54 months, with an average of 3.4 months,” but didn’t specify which state or states hit the 54-month mark.

Carr has continued addressing the topic throughout the week. “For the record, my position is that the government should not be spending your money to provide phone and Internet service to dead people. Governor Newsom is taking the opposite position, apparently,” he wrote yesterday.

When asked if the FCC will penalize California, Carr said at yesterday’s press conference yesterday that “we are looking at California and we’re going to make sure that we hold bad actors accountable, and we’re going to look at all the remedies that are on the table.”

Gomez: FCC plan shuts out eligible subscribers

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s one Democrat, said that Carr’s proposed rulemaking “goes well beyond” what’s needed to protect the integrity of Lifeline. “By proposing to use the same cruel and punitive eligibility standards recently imposed for Medicaid coverage, the Commission risks excluding large numbers of eligible households, including seniors, people with disabilities, rural residents, and Tribal communities, from a proven lifeline that millions rely on to stay connected to work, school, health care, and emergency services,” she said.

FCC aims to ensure “only living and lawful Americans” get Lifeline benefits Read More »

Trump FCC threatens to enforce equal-time rule on late-night talk shows

brendan carr, Equal Time Rule, FCC, Policy / Mike M. / January 21, 2026

FCC Democrat says the rules haven’t changed

The equal-time rule, formally known as the Equal Opportunities Rule, applies to radio or TV broadcast stations with FCC licenses to use the public airwaves. When a station gives time to one political candidate, it must provide comparable time and placement to an opposing candidate if an opposing candidate makes a request.

The rule has an exemption for candidate appearances on bona fide news programs. As the FCC explained in 2022, “appearances by legally qualified candidates on bona fide newscasts, interview programs, certain types of news documentaries, and during on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events are exempt from Equal Opportunities.”

Entertainment talk shows have generally been treated as bona fide news programs for this purpose. But Carr said in September that he’s not sure shows like The View should qualify for the exemption, and today’s public notice suggests the FCC may no longer treat these shows as exempt.

Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC, issued a press release criticizing the FCC for “a misleading announcement suggesting that certain late-night and daytime programs may no longer qualify for the long-standing ‘bona fide news interview’ exemption under the commission’s political broadcasting rules.”

“Nothing has fundamentally changed with respect to our political broadcasting rules,” Gomez said. “The FCC has not adopted any new regulation, interpretation, or commission-level policy altering the long-standing news exemption or equal time framework. For decades, the commission has recognized that bona fide news interviews, late-night programs, and daytime news shows are entitled to editorial discretion based on newsworthiness, not political favoritism. That principle has not been repealed, revised, or voted on by the commission. This announcement therefore does not change the law, but it does represent an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.”

Trump FCC threatens to enforce equal-time rule on late-night talk shows Read More »

Letting prisons jam contraband phones is a bad idea, phone companies tell FCC

brendan carr, FCC, Policy, prison phone jamming / Rejus Almole / January 6, 2026

FCC hopes you like jammin’ too

“Jamming will block all communications,” including 911 calls, CTIA tells FCC.

Credit: Getty Images | da-kuk

A Federal Communications Commission proposal to let state and local prisons jam contraband cell phones has support from Republican attorneys general and prison phone companies but faces opposition from wireless carriers that say it would disrupt lawful communications. Groups dedicated to Wi-Fi and GPS also raised concerns in comments to the FCC.

“Jamming will block all communications, not just communications from contraband devices,” wireless lobby group CTIA said in December 29 comments in response to Chairman Brendan Carr’s proposal. The CTIA said that “jamming blocks all communications, including lawful communications such as 911 calling,” and argued that the FCC “has no authority to allow jamming.”

CTIA members AT&T and Verizon expressed their displeasure in separate comments to the FCC. “The proposed legal framework is based on a flawed factual premise,” AT&T wrote.

While the Communications Act prohibits interference with authorized radio communications, Carr’s plan tries to sidestep this prohibition by proposing to de-authorize certain communications, AT&T wrote. “This legal framework, however, is premised on a fundamental factual error: the assumption that jammers will only block ‘unauthorized’ communications without impacting lawful uses. There is no way to jam some communications on a spectrum band but not others,” AT&T wrote.

Previous FCC leaders recognized the problem that radio jammers can’t differentiate between contraband and legitimate devices, AT&T said. “As explained above, there are no technical workarounds to that limitation with respect to jammers,” AT&T wrote.

“Jammers block all wireless communications”

In 2013, the FCC explained that jamming systems transmit on the same frequencies as their targets in order to disrupt the links between devices and network base stations and that this process “render[s] any wireless device operating on those frequencies unusable. When used to disrupt wireless devices, radio signal jammers cannot differentiate between contraband devices and legitimate devices, including devices making 911 calls. Radio signal jammers block all wireless communications on affected spectrum bands.”

That apparently hasn’t changed. The FCC’s new proposal issued in September 2025 said the commission’s “understanding is that jamming solutions block calls on all affected frequencies and… are unable to allow 911 calls to be transmitted.” But the proposal indicates this may be an acceptable outcome, as “some state DOC [Department of Corrections] officials have indicated that correctional facilities typically do not allow any calls from within, including emergency calls.”

If the FCC adopts its plan, it would “authorize, for the first time, non-federal operation of radio frequency (RF) jamming solutions in correctional facilities,” the proposal said.

Carr said in September that previous FCC actions, such as authorizing “contraband interdiction systems” and letting wireless carriers disable contraband phones at a prison’s request, have not been enough. “Contraband cellphones have been pouring into state and local prisons by the tens of thousands every year,” Carr said. “They are used to run drug operations, orchestrate kidnappings, and further criminal enterprises in communities all across the country.”

Carr said that prisons and jails will not be required to install jamming systems and that the FCC “proposes to authorize targeted jamming. Jamming technology can be precise enough that it does not interrupt the regular communications of law enforcement or community members in the vicinity.” The FCC proposal asks the public for comment on “restrictions that might prove necessary to ensure that jamming solutions are limited to this targeted use, and to mitigate the risk that these solutions are deployed in contexts other than a correctional facility environment.”

Jamming has support from 23 state attorneys general, all Republicans, who told the FCC that “inmates routinely use smuggled phones to coordinate criminal enterprises, intimidate witnesses, and orchestrate violence both inside and outside prison walls.” More jamming support came from the state Department of Corrections in both Florida and South Carolina.

Prison phone companies like jamming

Prison phone companies that would financially benefit from increased use of official phone systems also support jamming cell phones. Global Tel*Link (aka ViaPath) called the plan “one more tool to help combat the serious problem of contraband wireless devices in correctional facilities.”

NCIC Correctional Services, another prison phone firm, said that jamming to create “‘dead zones’ within correctional facilities would permit smaller jails to restrict contraband device access where it is not cost-effective to install managed access systems.” Detection Innovation Group, which sells inmate-tracking technology to prisons and jails, also urged the FCC to allow jamming.

Telecom industry groups say that limiting the effect of jamming will be difficult or impossible. The harms identified over a decade ago “remain the same today, although their effects are magnified by the increased use of wireless devices for broadband,” said the Telecommunications Industry Association, a standards-development group. “If an RF jamming solution is deployed at a correctional facility, such deployment risks not only interfering with voice communications but disrupting vital broadband services as well within the facility itself as well as the surrounding community.”

Verizon told the FCC that the Communications Act “requires more restrictive use of jamming devices than the NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] proposes.” The CTIA argued that jamming isn’t necessary because the wireless industry already offers Managed Access Systems (MAS) as “a safe and effective contraband interdiction ecosystem.”

A Managed Access System establishes “a private cellular network that captures communications (voice, text, data) on commercial wireless frequencies within a correctional facility, determines whether that exchange is coming from or going to a contraband device, and, if so, prevents those communications from connecting to the wireless provider’s network,” the CTIA said. “At the same time, MAS allows communications to and from approved devices to be transmitted without interruption, including 911 and public safety calls within the correctional facility.”

Wi-Fi and GPS groups warn of jamming risks

More opposition came from the Wi-Fi Alliance, a tech industry group that tests and certifies interoperability of Wi-Fi products. The FCC proposal failed to “address the potential impact of such jamming on lawfully operating Wi-Fi and other unlicensed devices,” the group told the FCC.

The FCC plan is not limited to jamming of phones on spectrum licensed for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The FCC additionally sought comment on whether contraband devices operating on Wi-Fi airwaves and other unlicensed spectrum should be subject to jamming. That’s concerning to the Wi-Fi Alliance because Wi-Fi operates on unlicensed spectrum that is shared by many users.

“Accordingly, declaring that a jammer on unlicensed spectrum is permitted to disrupt the communications of another device also operating on unlicensed spectrum is contrary to the foundational principle of Part 15 [of FCC rules], under which all unauthorized devices must cooperate in the use of spectrum,” the group said. “Moreover, authorizing the use of jamming equipment in unlicensed spectrum pursuant to Part 15 would undermine decades of global spectrum policy, weaken trust in license-exempt technologies by providing no assurance that devices using those technologies will work, and set a dangerous precedent for the intentional misuse of unlicensed spectrum.”

Letting jammers interfere with Wi-Fi and other unlicensed devices would effectively turn the jammers into “a de facto licensed service, operating with primary status in bands that are designated for unlicensed use,” the Wi-Fi Alliance said. “To achieve that undesirable result, the Commission would be required to change the Table of Frequency Allocations and issue authorizations for operations on unlicensed spectrum (just as it contemplates for the use of cell phone spectrum in jamming devices). That outcome would upend the premise of Part 15 operations.”

The GPS Innovation Alliance, another industry group, warned that even if the FCC imposes strict limits on transmission power and out-of-band emissions, “jammer transmissions can have spillover effects on adjacent and nearby band operations. Only specialized, encrypted signals, and specialized receivers and devices designed to decrypt those signals, are jam-resistant, in contrast to how most commercial technologies work.”

Now that public comments are in, Carr has to decide whether to move ahead with the plan as originally written, scrap it entirely, or come up with a compromise that might address some of the concerns raised by opponents. The FCC’s NPRM suggests a pilot program could be used to evaluate interference risks before a broader rollout, and the pilot idea received some support from carriers in their comments. A final proposal would be put to a vote of commissioners at the Republican-majority FCC.

Letting prisons jam contraband phones is a bad idea, phone companies tell FCC Read More »

No one loves President Trump more than FCC Chairman Brendan Carr

Anna Gomez, brendan carr, FCC, Features, Policy, president trump, tom wheeler / Kris Guyer / December 22, 2025

Trump’s biggest fan runs the FCC

Carr used to insist on FCC independence. Now he uses FCC to fight Trump’s battles.

President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell

Before he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr seemed to be a big believer in the agency’s role as an independent branch of the federal government. According to the pre-2025 version of Brendan Carr, the White House interfered with the agency’s independence when a Democratic president publicly urged the FCC to adopt net neutrality rules.

When the Biden-era FCC reinstated Obama-era net neutrality rules in 2024, Carr alleged that President Biden “took the extraordinary step to pressure the FCC—an independent agency that is designed to operate outside undue political influence from the Executive Branch.” As evidence, Carr pointed to a 2021 executive order in which Biden called on agency heads to “consider using their authorities” for various types of pro-competitive policies, including the adoption of net neutrality rules.

Carr said that President Obama similarly “pressure[d] an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.” Obama’s intrusion into this independence, according to Carr, came in November 2014 when the president released a two-minute video urging the agency to implement net neutrality rules and reclassify broadband providers as common carriers.

While the FCC was created as an independent agency, it isn’t apolitical. There are Republican and Democratic members, and by design, the president’s party has a majority. FCC policies change dramatically from one administration to the next.

But Carr couldn’t have been clearer about his belief that the president should not publicly urge the FCC to take specific actions. “The White House did not let the FCC chair do his job,” Carr said last year, referring to the events of 2014 and 2015 involving Obama and then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “The president intervened. He flipped him.”

But then Donald Trump won a second term in office and promoted Commissioner Carr to the position of FCC chairman in January 2025. A few weeks later, Trump issued an executive order declaring that historically independent agencies could no longer operate independently from the White House.

Carr’s devotion to President Trump

Trump has continued his longtime practice of publicly calling on FCC chairs to revoke broadcast licenses from news organizations that Trump dislikes. Former FCC chairs Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai rejected these calls when they led the agency. Carr has instead amplified Trump’s complaints and repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses through investigations into news distortion.

Carr, a longtime Trump supporter who sometimes wears a Trump-shaped lapel pin, wrote a Project 2025 chapter in 2023 describing how the FCC should be overhauled to achieve conservative priorities. It was never likely that he and Trump would differ much in their policy positions. But few, if any, leaders of historically independent agencies have aligned themselves with Trump as consistently and vocally as Carr has in his first year as FCC chairman.

Carr’s devotion to the president has been most obvious to the general public whenever he threatens broadcaster licenses. But Carr hardly seems independent of Trump when it comes to his other actions as head of the FCC. His press releases announcing various types of FCC decisions often praise Trump’s leadership and say the FCC is acting to advance a Trump priority.

“We are fully aligned with the agenda that President Trump is running,” Carr told The Wall Street Journal.

Far from insisting that the FCC make decisions independently, Carr has welcomed Trump’s direct orders. After Trump issued a December 11 executive order requiring the FCC to open a proceeding that could lead to preemption of state AI laws, Carr issued a statement saying that “the FCC welcomes President’s Trump’s direction.”

We emailed Carr in early December, requesting a phone interview or comments about whether he still believes the FCC should operate independently from the White House and did not receive a response. But on December 17, Carr confirmed during a Senate hearing that he no longer believes the FCC is independent from the White House.

“There’s been a sea change in the law since I wrote that sentence,” he said after being confronted with one of his previous statements describing the agency as independent. “The FCC is not an independent agency” because “the president can remove any member of the commission for any reason or no reason,” he said.

Wheeler, who is still active in tech and telecom policy at the Brookings Institution and Harvard Kennedy School, has watched the current FCC with dismay. “The FCC is a policy agency that exists in a political environment, and the Trump administration has turned it into a political agency existing in a policy environment,” Wheeler told Ars in a phone interview early this month.

Wheeler said he has “respect for Brendan, his brain, his political skills, his way of framing issues and expressing himself. I’m disappointed that he’s using them in the manner that he is, in just being a cipher for the MAGA agenda.”

Wheeler: Obama “never called me”

Congress created the FCC in 1934. As indications of its independence, the FCC has commissioners with specified tenures, a multimember structure, partisan balance, and adjudication authority. The agency can also issue regulations within limits set by Congress and courts.

US law lists 19 federal agencies, including the FCC, that are classified as “independent regulatory agencies.” The FCC’s independence was until recently acknowledged by the FCC itself, which said on its website that it is “an independent US government agency overseen by Congress.” Carr apparently wasn’t aware that the statement was still on the website until the December 17 Senate hearing. It was deleted quickly after Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) asked Carr, “Is your website wrong, is your website lying?”

Then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler and FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai smiling and talking to each other before a Congressional hearing. — Then-Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler (L) and FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai talk before testifying to the House Judiciary Committee on March 25, 2015, in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla

“Congress said, ‘you should be an independent agency,’ and Trump steps up and says, ‘no, you’re not an independent agency,’” Wheeler said. “Brendan apparently is going along with that if you judge from his trips to Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere.” Wheeler is also disappointed that after Trump’s executive order, “the Congress rolled over and just said, ‘oh, fine.’”

When Wheeler led a 2015 vote to implement net neutrality rules, Republicans in Congress claimed the agency was improperly influenced by Obama. “Five days of hearings under oath and an IG investigation that cleared me of wrongdoing,” Wheeler said, recalling the post-vote investigations by Congress and the FCC’s independent Inspector General’s office. “It was political. It was Republican-controlled committees who were looking for a reason to go after a Democratic-controlled FCC,” he said.

At the time, Wheeler told Congress there were “no secret instructions” from Obama. Wheeler said he treated Obama’s input “with respect” but also listened to “nearly four million Americans, who overwhelmingly spoke in favor of preserving a free and open Internet” in comments to the FCC.

Wheeler told Ars that during his term as FCC chairman, Obama “never called me.” Wheeler said that in his first week as chairman in 2013, “he said to me, ‘Tom, I will never call you. You’re an independent agency,’ and he was good to his word. Did he do a video? Yeah. Does he have a right to do a video? Of course.”

FCC decisions “coordinated through the White House”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC, said in a phone interview in early December that “it is appropriate for the president to have an opinion, even to put an opinion out there,” as Biden and Obama did on net neutrality. “The public statements are different than actions,” she said. “What we’re seeing now are direct actions to undermine our independence.”

Gomez said Trump’s frequent demands on the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses have a “more coercive effect” because of “the overall actions by this president to fire anyone that doesn’t do his will.” That includes Trump firing both Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission, another historically independent agency.

The Supreme Court has so far allowed the firing of former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to stand while Slaughter’s lawsuit against Trump remains pending. At oral arguments, it appeared likely that the Supreme Court will rule that Trump can fire FTC commissioners.

At the December 17 Senate hearing, Carr cited the FTC case to support his view that the FCC isn’t independent. Carr said it used to be assumed that FCC commissioners would be protected from removal by the Supreme Court’s 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which unanimously held that the president can only remove FTC commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

The Communications Act was passed one year before Humphrey’s Executor and did not include explicit protection from removal, but “the theory had been that courts would read for-cause removal into the [Communications] statute and that was the basis for that viewpoint,” Carr said. “I think now it’s clear that’s not the case, so formally speaking the FCC isn’t independent because we don’t have that key piece, which is for-cause removal protection.” Carr said “the sine qua non of independence” is having protection from removal by the president.

Gomez has said she doesn’t know why Trump hasn’t fired her yet. “That erosion of our independence is negative for a variety of reasons,” Gomez said. “What worries me is that we will continue to see this White House pressure the FCC to favor or punish certain companies, to influence media ownership or media coverage, and to shape what information reaches the public.”

Gomez said the agency this year started sending decisions to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review before they are voted on. This practice is in line with one of the directives in the Trump executive order that declared independent agencies are no longer independent.

“We have a multi-member commission that makes these decisions, and somehow this is all getting coordinated through the White House before [the commissioners] vote on something. That is not independent,” Gomez said. While there were previously post-vote reviews, such as the standard reviews required under a 1980 law called the Paperwork Reduction Act, the OIRA process consists of “pre-clearance and approval of anything that we’re voting on. That is new,” Gomez said.

Gomez doesn’t know if those reviews have resulted in any significant changes to FCC actions before votes. “I’m not privy to that,” she said.

Carr heaps praise on Trump

Even before the Trump executive order that purported to eliminate the FCC’s independence, Carr attributed one of his first actions to an order from Trump. One day after the January 20 inauguration, Carr announced that he was ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. The press release said the FCC action was taken “pursuant to” Trump’s day-one executive order on DEI.

“Today, pursuant to the policies stated in the Executive Order, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced that he is ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI,” the January 21 press release said. In the months since, Carr has repeatedly demanded that companies end internal DEI practices in exchange for FCC merger approvals.

Carr’s press releases announcing FCC decisions have continued to praise Trump for his leadership of the country. Instead of stating that the FCC makes decisions independently, without “undue political influence from the Executive Branch,” Carr’s press releases often specifically describe FCC decisions as advancing Trump’s agenda.

“This action follows President Trump’s leadership and the Trump Administration’s decision to usher in prosperity through deregulation,” one such Carr press release said while announcing the “Delete, Delete, Delete” plan to eliminate many of the agency’s regulations.

Carr makes statements praising Trump both when he announces decisions on politically charged topics and when he announces decisions on more routine matters handled by the FCC. “With President Trump’s leadership, America is entering a new Golden Age of innovation in space—one where US businesses are going to dominate,” Carr said in October to explain why he was making changes to space licensing and spectrum use rules.

Carr: “Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape”

Of course, Carr’s most controversial initiative almost certainly wouldn’t exist if not for President Trump’s frequent demands that news outlets be punished for supposed bias. Carr’s approach differs markedly from the two previous FCC chairs—Rosenworcel, a Democrat, and Pai, a Republican—who said the FCC should avoid regulating broadcast content in order to uphold the free speech protections in the First Amendment.

By contrast, Carr has repeatedly threatened to enforce the FCC’s previously dormant news distortion policy against broadcasters by taking away station licenses. Carr has made it clear in numerous public statements that he’s taking his cue from Trump.

“For years, people cowed down to the executives behind these companies based in Hollywood and New York, and they just accepted that these national broadcasters could dictate how people think about topics, that they could set the narrative for the country—and President Trump fundamentally rejected it,” Carr told Newsmax in July. “He smashed the facade that these are gatekeepers that can determine what people think. Everything we’re seeing right now flows from that decision by President Trump, and he’s winning. PBS has been defunded. NPR has been defunded. CBS is committing to restoring fact-based journalism… President Trump stood up to these legacy media gatekeepers, and now their business models are falling apart.”

Carr made that statement after approving CBS owner Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance on the condition that the company install an ombudsman, which Carr described as a “bias monitor.” Carr only approved the transaction once Paramount reached a $16 million settlement with Trump, who sued the company because he didn’t like how CBS edited a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.

While the FCC order claimed the merger approval and ombudsman condition were unrelated to the Trump lawsuit, Carr repeatedly credited Trump for forcing changes at news broadcasters when giving interviews about that and other FCC actions. Carr uses similar language throughout these various interviews, saying that Trump “ran directly at” news organizations during his election campaign and “smashed the facade.”

“President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape,” he said in one interview. He said in another that “President Trump ran directly at the legacy mainstream media, and he smashed a facade that they’re the gatekeepers of truth.”

Ted Cruz and Rand Paul say Carr went too far

When Carr threatened the licenses of ABC stations over comments made by comedian Jimmy Kimmel, even some prominent Republicans said he went too far. “Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said, calling Carr’s statement that ABC owner Disney must take action against Kimmel “absolutely inappropriate.”

Carr unconvincingly claimed that he never threatened ABC station licenses, even though he specifically said stations that continued to air Kimmel’s show were “running the possibility of fines or license revocations.” One person who didn’t buy Carr’s explanation was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). The senator from Texas didn’t like it when Carr told ABC and Disney that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Cruz said Carr’s “easy way or the hard way” statement was an obvious threat and “right outta Goodfellas.” Cruz would later say at the December 17 hearing that Congress should restrict the FCC’s power to intimidate news broadcasters. Cruz said, “the public interest standard and its wretched offspring, like the news distortion rule, have outlived whatever utility they once had and it is long past time for Congress to pass reforms.”

Even after bipartisan criticism, Carr refused to end his news distortion investigations. “How about no,” Carr wrote in November. “On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.”

Wheeler: “Brendan needs to man up and own his decisions”

One of Carr’s defenses of his news distortion probes is that Rosenworcel’s FCC kept an advocacy group’s petition to deny a Fox station license renewal on the docket for over a year instead of dismissing it outright. Rosenworcel ultimately dismissed the petition, which alleged that Fox willfully distorted news with false reports of fraud in the 2020 election that Trump lost.

The petition pointed out that a judge presiding over a Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox found that Fox News aired false statements about Dominion. Fox subsequently agreed to a $788 million settlement.

Rosenworcel simultaneously dismissed the Fox petition and three complaints alleging anti-Trump or anti-conservative bias by ABC, CBS, and NBC, saying that all four requests “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.” Carr reinstated the conservative complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC, but not the one against Fox.

Carr defended his actions by saying the Biden administration “weaponized our country’s communications laws,” and that his own FCC simply “put the CBS complaint on the same procedural footing that the Biden FCC determined it should apply to the Fox complaint.”

Wheeler said Carr shouldn’t blame his actions on his predecessors. “I own my decisions,” Wheeler said. “I think that Brendan needs to man up and own his decisions and quit this ‘what about.’ He’s always out there saying, ‘Well, what about what Jessica did or what about what Wheeler did?’… Is that the best he can do? I mean, take responsibility for your decisions and go forward.”

Gomez: “This administration has weaponized the FCC”

Gomez said that when Congress created the FCC’s predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission, “it decided that it was too dangerous to have one person beholden to the president, to the whims of one person, in charge of the most important communication medium of the time, which was radio. So Congress decided, after deliberating it, to create a multi-member independent agency. And when it created the FCC, it did exactly that as well.”

Gomez continued: “[I]t has been important throughout history to keep that independence from political pressure. And what you’re seeing in this administration is completely different. This administration has weaponized the FCC in order to retaliate, pressure, and intimidate companies into doing its will.”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York, on Friday, Sept. 19, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Gomez said the weaponization is evident in how the FCC handles mergers and other transactions in which the agency decides whether to approve the transfer of licenses from one company to another. Carr has explicitly demanded that companies eliminate their DEI policies in exchange for approvals.

“This FCC has said that it will not approve a single license transfer for companies that have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies,” Gomez said, noting that the FCC’s anti-DEI policies were implemented right after Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. “That is why you see the FCC granting transfers of control immediately after getting letters from companies agreeing to drop their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.”

Companies such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Skydance have ended DEI programs to gain Carr’s approval for transactions.

“We also saw that weaponization of the licensing authority with regard to the [FCC] pressuring EchoStar to give up its licenses,” Gomez said. “And that was done purposefully in order to ensure that other parties could get ahold of EchoStar’s licenses for spectrum.”

Trump intervened in EchoStar battle

SpaceX and AT&T struck deals to buy EchoStar spectrum licenses after Carr threatened to revoke the licenses. Trump intervened after Carr’s threat, as Bloomberg reported that Trump called Carr and summoned him to a White House meeting with EchoStar President Charlie Ergen and urged them to make a deal.

Carr’s pressuring of EchoStar was criticized by the Free State Foundation, a free-market group that usually supports Republican priorities at the FCC.

“Rescission of deadline extension orders granted months earlier undoubtedly creates a type of regulatory uncertainty,” the foundation said in reference to the FCC’s investigation into EchoStar. “Arbitrary and unforeseen” changes to rules or agency actions create instability in the market for wireless broadband deployment, it said.

Gomez said the FCC’s “authority rests on technical expertise, evidence, and the public record. When our agency’s decisions are insulated from partisan pressure, the public can trust the outcomes are driven by facts rather than politics.” She said it is also “important to maintain our global credibility because we have been viewed as a model for transparent, rule-based telecommunications regulation.”

Gomez, a telecommunications attorney, has worked in various private-sector and government roles over the past 30 years, including as deputy chief of the FCC International Bureau and senior legal adviser to then-FCC Chairman William Kennard during the Clinton administration. Prior to Biden’s nomination for her to serve as an FCC commissioner in 2023, she was at the US State Department as senior adviser for International Information and Communications Policy.

Executive order required review of FCC actions

Gomez said the FCC submitting decisions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs before they’re voted on is a big change for an independent agency. Gomez said she’s deeply familiar with the OIRA process because of her previous work at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency that advises the president on telecom policy. She was the NTIA deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013.

The Trump executive order that purports to eliminate agency independence states that “all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies, shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.”

In a section titled “OIRA Review of Agency Regulations,” the Trump executive order amends a definition of agency that was previously included in Section 3(b) of a 1993 executive order on regulatory reviews. The specified section in that Clinton executive order defined agency as “any authority of the United States that is an ‘agency’ under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), other than those considered to be independent regulatory agencies.” This carveout excluded independent agencies like the FCC from the requirement to submit draft regulatory actions for review.

The definition of “agency” in Trump’s executive order removes the language that excluded all independent regulatory agencies from OIRA requirements but includes a carveout for the Federal Reserve. Trump’s order also added the Federal Election Commission to the roster of agencies whose actions require OIRA review of significant actions, such as rulemakings.

While Gomez objects to the pre-clearance requirement, she noted that there are proper ways in which the FCC coordinates with executive branch agencies. For example, the FCC has a memorandum of understanding with the NTIA on how to coordinate spectrum management actions to prevent interference with federal systems that rely on specific radio frequencies.

“Another good use of coordination is in security, for example, when we coordinate with the security agencies to make sure that we are taking national security into consideration with our actions,” she said. “Our statute requires us to coordinate with the State Department and the Department of Justice… and that’s important to do in advance, and it’s good government.”

It’s also not uncommon for the FCC to receive advice from the current president’s administration through the NTIA, which expresses the executive branch’s views on telecom-policy matters in filings submitted in the public record. Those dockets attract filings from government agencies, companies, industry trade groups, advocacy groups, and anyone else who is interested in filing a comment, and the FCC takes the input into account before making decisions.

“What is improper,” Gomez said, “is when our decisions are being directed by this administration and impeding us from making our independent, expert-based judgment of how to manage resources and act in the public interest.”

Pai defied Trump, insisted on FCC independence

Carr was hired as a legal adviser by then-Commissioner Pai in 2014 and was briefly the FCC’s general counsel during Pai’s first year as chair in 2017. Carr became an FCC commissioner in August 2017 after a nomination by President Trump.

Carr and Pai have seemingly agreed on nearly everything to do with the FCC, with the most obvious exception being the regulation of broadcast media content. “I believe in the First Amendment,” Pai said in 2017, six days after Trump called for NBC license revocations. “The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment. And under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

In a January 2021 speech during his last week as FCC chairman, Pai discussed how he led a 2018 vote against Sinclair Broadcast Group’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media Company because it would violate station ownership limits. Carr joined Pai in the unanimous vote.

“Sinclair is widely perceived to be a right-leaning broadcaster,” Pai said in the speech delivered at the American Enterprise Institute. “And the perception is probably accurate, just as it is probably accurate to say that many of our nation’s broadcast networks lean to the left. But the last time I checked, the First Amendment still applies to broadcasters, which means Sinclair’s perceived political views and the content of its newscasts should be entirely irrelevant to the FCC’s decision-making process.”

Trump didn’t like Pai’s rejection of the Sinclair deal. The president tweeted in July 2018, “So sad and unfair that the FCC wouldn’t approve the Sinclair Broadcast merger with Tribune. This would have been a great and much needed Conservative voice for and of the People. Liberal Fake News NBC and Comcast gets approved, much bigger, but not Sinclair. Disgraceful!”

Reflecting on this incident and other Trump comments about the Sinclair rejection in his January 2021 speech, Pai said, “in terms of powerful opponents in Washington, it’s hard to top the president.” Pai told the audience “that you don’t demonstrate the FCC’s independence by saying you’re independent. You do it by acting independently… This decision may have won me few friends, but I’m proud I lived up to my oath and preserved the agency’s independence.”

It’s no secret

Wheeler and Pai often clashed over policy differences when they served on the commission together. Pai even accused Wheeler of taking orders from Obama on net neutrality. But Pai’s exit speech made a positive impression on Wheeler.

“I seem to recall that Pai at the end of his term made a speech in which he talked about some of the proudest things he had done was maintaining the independence of the agency and protecting the First Amendment speech rights of the people,” Wheeler said.

While federal agency operations can change in ways that aren’t readily visible to the public, the changes to agency independence in Trump’s second term haven’t been hidden. “One thing about this is so much is out in the open, which I think is an effort to normalize it,” Gomez said. “And we have to resist it.”

Gomez knows she might not be able to serve out her entire term given that Trump fired Democrats from the FTC. The risk would be particularly high if the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favor in the case filed by Slaughter. While the Senate has the authority to confirm or deny presidential nominations to the FCC and FTC, a Trump victory in the FTC case would give the president more power to dictate the membership of independent agencies.

“I don’t know why,” Gomez said when asked if she knows why Trump hasn’t fired her yet. “I don’t want to speculate. We’ll find out, I guess. But I’m focused on doing my work, and every day that I can continue to do my work and to speak out on behalf of consumers and the First Amendment is a good day.”

No one loves President Trump more than FCC Chairman Brendan Carr Read More »

FCC chair scrubs website after learning it called FCC an “independent agency”

brendan carr, FCC, jimmy kimmel, Policy / Tim Belzer / December 17, 2025

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz wants to restrict FCC’s power to intimidate broadcasters.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr speaks at a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee oversight hearing on December 17, 2025, in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | Heather Diehl

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today faced blistering criticism in a Senate hearing for his September threats to revoke ABC station licenses over comments made by Jimmy Kimmel. While Democrats provided nearly all the criticism, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that Congress should act to restrict the FCC’s power to intimidate news broadcasters.

As an immediate result of today’s hearing, the FCC removed a statement from its website that said it is an independent agency. Carr, who has embraced President Trump’s declaration that independent agencies may no longer operate independently from the White House, apparently didn’t realize that the website still called the FCC an independent agency.

“Yes or no, is the FCC an independent agency?” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) asked. Carr answered that the FCC is not independent, prompting Luján to point to a statement on the FCC website calling the FCC “an independent US government agency overseen by Congress.”

“Just so you know, Brendan, on your website, it just simply says, man, the FCC is independent. This isn’t a trick question… Is your website wrong? Is your website lying?” Luján asked.

“Possibly. The FCC is not an independent agency,” Carr answered. The website still included the statement of independence when Luján asked the question, but it’s now gone.

Carr: Trump can fire any member “for any reason or no reason”

Carr, who argued during the Biden years that the FCC must remain independent from the White House and accused Biden of improperly pressuring the agency, said today that it isn’t independent because the Communications Act does not give commissioners protection from removal by the president.

“The president can remove any member of the commission for any reason or no reason,” Carr said. Carr said his new position is a result of “a sea change in the law” related to an ongoing case involving the Federal Trade Commission, in which the Supreme Court appears likely to approve Trump’s firing of an FTC Democrat.

“I think it comes as no surprise that I’m aligned with President Trump on policy, I think that’s why he designated me as chairman… I can be fired by the president,” Carr said. Carr also said, “The Constitution is clear that all executive power is vested in the president, and Congress can’t change that by legislation.”

Changing the FCC website doesn’t change the law, of course. US law specifically lists 19 federal agencies, including the FCC, that are classified as “independent regulatory agencies.” Indications of the FCC’s independence include that it has commissioners with specified tenures, a multimember structure, partisan balance, and adjudication authority. Trump could test that historical independence by firing an FCC commissioner and waiting to see if the Supreme Court allows it, as he did with the FTC.

Ted Cruz wants to restrict FCC power

Carr’s statements on independence came toward the end of an FCC oversight hearing that lasted nearly three hours. Democrats on the Senate Commerce Committee spent much of the time accusing Carr of censoring broadcast stations, while Carr and Committee Chairman Cruz spent more time lobbing allegations of censorship at the Biden administration. But Cruz made it clear that he still thinks Carr shouldn’t have threatened ABC and suggested that Congress reduce the FCC’s power.

Cruz alleged that Democrats supported Biden administration censorship, but in the next sentence, he said the FCC shouldn’t have the legal authority that Carr has used to threaten broadcasters. Cruz said:

If my colleagues across the aisle do what many expect and hammer the chairman over their newfound religion on the First Amendment and free speech, I will be obliged to point out that those concerns were miraculously absent when the Biden administration was pressuring Big Tech to silence Americans for wrongthink on COVID and election security. It will underscore a simple truth, that the public interest standard and its wretched offspring, like the news distortion rule, have outlived whatever utility they once had and it is long past time for Congress to pass reforms.

Cruz avoided criticizing Carr directly today and praised the agency chairman for a “productive and refreshing” approach on most FCC matters. Nonetheless, Cruz’s statement suggests that he’d like to strip Carr and future FCC chairs of the power to wield the public interest standard and news distortion policy against broadcasters.

At today’s hearing and in recent months, Carr defended his actions on Kimmel by citing the public interest standard that the FCC applies to broadcasters that have licenses to use the public airwaves. Carr also defended his frequent threats to enforce the FCC’s rarely invoked news distortion policy, even though the FCC apparently hasn’t made a finding of news distortion since 1993.

Cruz said today he agrees with Carr “that Jimmy Kimmel is angry, overtly partisan, and profoundly unfunny,” and that “ABC and its affiliates would have been fully within their rights to fire him or simply to no longer air his program.” But Cruz added that government cannot “force private entities to take actions that the government cannot take directly. Government officials threatening adverse consequences for disfavored content is an unconstitutional coercion that chills protected speech.”

Cruz continued:

This is why it was so insidious how the Biden administration jawboned social media into shutting down conservatives online over accurate information on COVID or voter fraud. My Democrat colleagues were persistently silent over that scandal, but I welcome them now having discovered the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Democrat or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion. Mr. Chairman, my question is this, so long as there is a public interest standard, shouldn’t it be understood to encompass robust First Amendment protections to ensure that the FCC cannot use it to chill speech?

Carr answered, “I agree with you there and I think the examples you laid out of weaponization in the Biden years are perfect examples.” Carr criticized liberals for asking the Biden-era FCC to not renew a Fox station license and criticized Congressional Democrats for “writing letters to cable companies pressuring them to drop Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax because they disagreed with the political perspectives of those cable channels.”

Cruz seemed satisfied with the answer and changed the topic to the FCC’s management of spectrum. After that, much of the hearing consisted of Democrats pointing to Carr’s past statements supporting free speech and accusing him of using the FCC to suppress broadcasters’ speech.

Senate Democrats criticize Carr’s Kimmel threats

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Carr if it “is appropriate to use your position to threaten companies that broadcast political satire.” Carr responded, “I think any licensee that operates on the public airwaves has a responsibility to comply with the public interest standard, and that’s been the case for decades.”

Klobuchar replied, “I asked if you think it’s appropriate for you to use your position to threaten companies, and this incident with Kimmel wasn’t an isolated event. You launched investigations into every major broadcast network except Fox. Is that correct?”

Carr noted that “we have a number of investigations ongoing.” Later, he said, “If you want to step back and talk about weaponization, we saw that for four years in the Biden administration.”

“Joe Biden is no longer president,” Klobuchar said. “You are head of the FCC, and Donald Trump is president, and I am trying to deal with this right now.”

As he has in the past, Carr claimed today that he never threatened ABC station licenses. “Democrats at the time were saying that we explicitly threatened to pull a license if Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t fired,” Carr said. “That never happened; that was nothing more than projection and distortion by Democrats. What I am saying is any broadcaster that uses the airwaves, whether radio or TV, has to comply with the public interest standard.”

In fact, Carr said on a podcast in September that broadcast stations should tell ABC and its owner Disney that “we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) pointed to another Carr statement from the podcast in which he said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Schatz criticized Carr’s claim that he never threatened licenses. “You’re kind of tiptoeing through the tulips here,” Schatz said.

FCC Democrat: Agency is censoring Trump critics

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, testified at today’s hearing and said that “the First Amendment applies to broadcasters regardless of whether they use spectrum or not, and the Communications Act prohibits the FCC from censoring broadcasters.”

Gomez said the Trump administration “has been on a campaign to censor content and to control the media and others, any critics of this administration, and it is weaponizing any levers it has in order to control that media. That includes using the FCC to threaten licensees, and broadcasters are being chilled. We are hearing from broadcasters that they are afraid to air programming that is critical of this administration because they’re afraid of being dragged before the FCC in an investigation.”

Gomez suggested the “public interest” phrase is being used by the FCC too vaguely in reference to investigations of broadcast stations. She said the FCC should “define what we mean by operating in the public interest,” saying the commission has been using the standard “as a means to go after any content we don’t like.” She said that “it’s still unconstitutional to revoke licenses based solely on content that the FCC doesn’t like.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) criticized Carr for investigating San Francisco-based KCBS over a report on Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities, in which the station described vehicles driven by ICE agents. Carr defended the probe today, saying, “The concern there in the report was there may have been interference with lawful ICE operations and so we were asking questions about what happened.”

Markey said, “The news journalists were just covering an important news story, and some conservatives were upset by the coverage, so you used your power as FCC chairman to hang a sword of Damocles over a local radio station’s head… Guess what happened? The station demoted the anchor who first read that news report over the air and pulled back on its political coverage. You got what you wanted.”

Carr said, “Broadcasters understand, perhaps for the first time in years, that they’re going to be held accountable to the public interest, to broadcast hoax rules, to the news distortion policy. I think that’s a good thing.”

Carr then criticized Markey for signing a letter to the FCC in 2018 that asked the agency to investigate conservative broadcaster Sinclair. The Markey/Carr exchange ended with the two men shouting over each other, making much of it unintelligible, although Markey said that Carr should resign because he’s creating a chilling effect on news broadcasters.

Cruz similarly criticized Democrats for targeting Sinclair, prompting Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) to defend the 2018 letter. “Chairman Carr’s threats to companies he directly regulates are not the same thing as a letter from Congress requesting an agency examine a matter of public concern. Members on both sides of the aisle frequently write similar letters; that’s the proper oversight role of Congress,” he said.

FCC chair scrubs website after learning it called FCC an “independent agency” Read More »

“How about no”: FCC boss Brendan Carr says he won’t end news distortion probes

brendan carr, FCC, news distortion policy, Policy / Rejus Almole / November 14, 2025

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr says he won’t scrap the agency’s controversial news distortion policy despite calls from a bipartisan group of former FCC chairs and commissioners.

“How about no,” Carr wrote in an X post in response to the petition from former FCC leaders. “On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.”

The petition filed yesterday by former FCC chairs and commissioners asked the FCC to repeal its 1960s-era news distortion policy, which Carr has repeatedly invoked in threats to revoke broadcast licenses. In the recent Jimmy Kimmel controversy, Carr said that ABC affiliates could have licenses revoked for news distortion if they kept the comedian on the air.

The petition said the Kimmel incident and several other Carr threats illustrate “the extraordinary intrusions on editorial decision-making that Chairman Carr apparently understands the news distortion policy to permit.” The petition argued that the “policy’s purpose—to eliminate bias in the news—is not a legitimate government interest,” that it has chilled broadcasters’ speech, that it has been weaponized for partisan purposes, that it is overly vague, and is unnecessary given the separate rule against broadcast hoaxes.

“The news distortion policy is no longer justifiable under today’s First Amendment doctrine and no longer necessary in today’s media environment… The Commission should repeal the policy in full and recognize that it may not investigate or penalize broadcasters for ‘distorting,’ ‘slanting,’ or ‘staging’ the news, unless the broadcast at issue independently meets the high standard for broadcasting a dangerous hoax under 47 C.F.R. § 73.1217,” the petition said.

News distortion policy rarely enforced

The petition was filed by Mark Fowler, a Republican who chaired the FCC from 1981 to 1987; Dennis Patrick, a Republican who chaired the FCC from 1987 to 1989; Alfred Sikes, a Republican who chaired the FCC from 1989 to 1993; Tom Wheeler, a Democrat who chaired the FCC from 2013 to 2017; Andrew Barrett, a Republican who served as a commissioner from 1989 to 1996; Ervin Duggan, a Democrat who served as a commissioner from 1990 to 1994; and Rachelle Chong, a Republican who served as a commissioner from 1994 to 1997.

“How about no”: FCC boss Brendan Carr says he won’t end news distortion probes Read More »

ISPs created so many fees that FCC will kill requirement to list them all

brendan carr, FCC, Policy / Rejus Almole / October 8, 2025

The FCC was required by Congress to implement broadband-label rules, but the Carr FCC says the law doesn’t “require itemizing pass through fees that vary by location.”

“Commenters state that itemizing such fees requires providers to produce multiple labels for identical services,” the FCC plan says, with a footnote to comments from industry groups such as USTelecom and NCTA. “We believe, consistent with commenters in the Delete, Delete, Delete proceeding, that itemizing can lead to a proliferation of labels and of labels so lengthy that the fees overwhelm other important elements of the label.”

In a blog post Monday, Carr said his plan is part of a “focus on consumer protection.” He said the FCC “will vote on a notice that would reexamine broadband nutrition labels so that we can separate the wheat from the chaff. We want consumers to get quick and easy access to the information they want and need to compare broadband plans (as Congress has provided) without imposing unnecessary burdens.”

ISPs would still be required to provide the labels, but with less information. The NPRM said that eliminating the rules targeted for deletion will not “change the core label requirements to display a broadband consumer label containing critical information about the provider’s service offerings, including information about pricing, introductory rates, data allowances, and performance metrics.”

ISPs said listing fees was too hard

In 2023, five major trade groups representing US broadband providers petitioned the FCC to scrap the list-every-fee requirement before it took effect. Comcast told the commission that the rule “impose[s] significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements.”

Rejecting the industry complaints, then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said that “every consumer needs transparent information when making decisions about what Internet service offering makes the most sense for their family or household. No one wants to be hit with charges they didn’t ask for or they did not expect.”

The Rosenworcel FCC’s order denying the industry petition pointedly said that ISPs could simplify pricing instead of charging loads of fees. “ISPs could alternatively roll such discretionary fees into the base monthly price, thereby eliminating the need to itemize them on the label,” the order said.

ISPs created so many fees that FCC will kill requirement to list them all Read More »

FCC chairman leads “cruel” vote to take Wi-Fi access away from school kids

brendan carr, FCC, Policy, wi-fi hotspots / Rejus Almole / October 1, 2025

The FCC votes were criticized by advocacy groups. “Students who rely on long bus rides to complete assignments and library patrons who depend on hotspots for work, education, or telehealth will suddenly lose access to essential tools. This decision is a step backward,” said Joseph Wender, executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition.

“Chairman Carr’s cruel move to delete our kids’ Internet connections won’t make America smarter,” said Revati Prasad, executive director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. The FCC “openly voted to snatch back the opportunity to offer more Americans, especially in rural areas, the high-speed Internet access to do the business of life online—pay bills, make telehealth appointments, fill out school applications—after the library closes,” American Library Association President Sam Helmick said.

The advocacy groups said that in New Mexico, “Farmington Municipal Schools equipped its 90 buses with Wi-Fi, serving over 6,500 students daily. Parents reported that children returned home with homework already completed.” In Ohio, “the Brown County Public Library’s hotspot program allowed homeschool families to join virtual classes, entrepreneurs to run mobile businesses, and veterans to participate in telehealth appointments and certification testing.”

Helmick said the library association is also “discouraged by the lack of due process, which left no opportunity for staff, patrons and library advocates to give input on the draft order.” Gomez similarly criticized the process, saying the FCC didn’t release the draft order until after the deadline for interested parties to meet with commissioners’ offices.

Gomez: Programs weren’t illegal

Gomez disputed Carr’s legal argument, saying that “Congress gave the FCC permission to expand the applications of E-Rate funding as the technologies used to educate children evolve.” She pointed out that the Universal Service law says the FCC may designate additional services for support. Gomez continued:

When the E-Rate program was implemented, dial-up Internet was the standard, and today, September 30th, 2025, AOL is discontinuing dial-up service. It is safe to say the landscape of communications technology has changed dramatically throughout the life of the E-Rate program. As underscored during my visit to the High School for Environmental Studies in New York a couple of weeks ago, students are now using Chromebooks in classrooms on a regular basis, and they are expected to submit homework assignments online using platforms like Google classroom. These changes are made possible with support from E-Rate funding.

Gomez said that in 2003, under President George W. Bush, the FCC “expanded E-Rate support to cover Internet access for bookmobiles. It also clarified that E-Rate funding could cover a school bus driver’s use of wireless services while transporting students, a librarian’s use of wireless services on a library’s mobile library unit van, and teachers’ use of wireless services while accompanying students on a field trip. Expanding E-Rate support to cover hotspots and Wi-Fi on school buses was consistent with that precedent.”

FCC chairman leads “cruel” vote to take Wi-Fi access away from school kids Read More »