“The government has no place in the newsroom.” That was once a near-universal principle articulated by leaders on both sides of the aisle, including then–FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai — who later went on to serve as FCC Chairman under the first Trump administration. In fact, in 2017, when then-President Trump attacked NBC for what he described as “fake news,” Ajit Pai, as his sitting chair, said:
I believe in the First Amendment, the FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke the license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.
Yet, just weeks into the second Trump Administration, Chairman Brendan Carr, who served as General Counsel under Pai, is using the FCC’s regulatory power to demand unedited interview footage, threaten license revocation, and probe stations that dare to report news stories unfavorable to the White House. This kind of pressure brings us back to the notoriously paranoid Nixon era and his infamous obsession with controlling the news media.
During that time, however, CBS stood up to the pressure in a defining moment in broadcast history. The network aired a hard-hitting documentary in 1971 holding the Administration to account that revealed how the Defense Department used millions of taxpayer dollars to promote the Vietnam War. When Congressional leaders demanded all the unused footage, CBS President Frank Stanton risked a contempt charge — along with possible jail time — and refused. That principled stand jolted the full House committee awake, and they effectively killed the subpoena. Stanton’s victory is part of a long line of journalists who stood up to Nixon, uncovered illegal activity, and eventually toppled his presidency.
In a stark reversal of that legacy, CBS recently handed over unedited material from a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris after the White House and FCC Chairman Carr demanded it. The result is a chilling precedent where broadcast newsrooms may feel they must comply to avoid retaliation — even if it undermines decades of First Amendment protections.
Chair Carr is using the fact that CBS has a merger pending before the agency to pressure CBS to capitulate, a marked swing toward Trump’s Nixonian views, which contrasts with his previous positions in narrowly focused merger reviews.
Even more concerning, Chairman Carr has also set his sights on local stations like KCBS in San Francisco for coverage of immigration enforcement. He has announced a wide-ranging investigation of local stations affiliated with the NPR and PBS networks for supposed underwriting (advertising) violations, explicitly to oppose funding for public broadcasting. And when the Biden FCC dismissed news distortion complaints that had been filed against ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX-owned local TV stations, Carr reversed course on all of them — except the most well-founded complaint against the FOX-affiliated station, which was grounded in court findings that Fox News and Fox Business broadcasted false claims about Dominion Voting systems.
Even staunch conservatives are alarmed. An open letter from a former FCC chief counsel and a First Amendment champion warned that the Constitution bars public officials from using indirect methods — like regulatory threats — to achieve what they can’t do directly. As he noted, Mr. Carr has often set himself up as a defender of the First Amendment. When Democratic members of Congress wrote asking media outlets about misinformation regarding the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic, Carr was outraged:
This is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys. …. A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official, not targeted by them.
The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page stated, “Mr. Trump clearly wants to intimidate the press, and it’s no credit to the FCC to see it reinforcing that with an inquiry.” The equally conservative CATO expressed dismay and concern that the FCC could be pressuring journalists not to cover police activity via its investigation into KCBS.
These bedrock principles of press freedom, once championed by FCC leaders of all political stripes, are now at risk of being turned inside out.
Thank goodness for FCC Commissioner Gomez, who explained that Carr’s actions are “designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions. The Communications Act clearly prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcasters, and the First Amendment protects journalistic decisions against government intimidation.”
Make no mistake, UCC Media Justice is a strong advocate of broadcaster accountability, but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. For example, we have long championed structural ownership rules that can be applied even handedly and describe clear rules of the road if they are enforced and loopholes eliminated. When UCC Media Justice originally challenged a racist station’s broadcast license renewal in the 1960s, it was grounded in detailed factual findings and evidence meticulously compiled. The FCC reviewed the material. It eventually concluded that it was not in the public interest, for example, to select only white clergy for a daily 1-minute devotional program.
Solutions are still possible. But even as we often press to hold broadcasters (and other media) accountable, this does not mean the Commission should be second-guessing editorial decisions or punishing coverage the White House doesn’t like. Our founders risked their lives in the 1960s to ensure the public was accurately informed; we cannot let those gains unravel now.
While we often are head to head with broadcasters on critical matters — we will stand alongside them now as, hopefully, they press for their own principled journalistic decisions against this onslaught. Publicly funded broadcasting, protected by the firewalls we have in place now, is essential for the republic. Core democratic principles and due process have never been more important. UCC Media Justice will stand firm. To ensure our work for communications and media justice remains strong in the coming months, please consider making a generous contribution to UCC Media Justice today.