The president is lashing out at an NBC host. As the agency\u2019s former chair, I can only hope it stands up for free speech<\/p>\n
Will the FCC chairperson again abuse his authority over broadcast licenses to put a Band-Aid on Donald Trump\u2019s thin skin?<\/p>\n
Since the opening days of the Trump presidency, Brendan Carr has acted as the president\u2019s attack dog<\/a> to coerce broadcasters to say things that please his client. Only days after taking office in January 2025, Carr revived a previously dismissed<\/a> complaint against CBS for the editing of 60 Minutes that tracked candidate Trump\u2019s specious lawsuit on the matter. At the time, the FCC was considering the transfer of CBS licenses to Skydance, a decision that did not come until after CBS agreed to pay<\/a> $16m to settle with Trump. In September, after Jimmy Kimmel\u2019s remarks about Charlie Kirk, Carr urged broadcasters to take action, saying \u201cwe can do this the easy way or the hard way\u201d<\/a> \u2013 an attack even the senator Ted Cruz said sounded \u201cright out of Goodfellas<\/a>\u201d. In March 2026, he threatened broadcasters<\/a> over their coverage of the Iran war after the president complained on Truth Social. In April, he ordered<\/a> Disney\u2019s eight ABC-owned television stations to submit their licenses for premature review, even though most aren\u2019t even halfway through their license term (Disney, ABC and the stations are suing<\/a>).<\/p>\n Tom Wheeler was chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission from 2013 to 2017<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The president is lashing out at an NBC host. As the agency\u2019s former chair, I can only hope it stands up for free speech Will the FCC chairperson again abuse his authority over broadcast licenses to put a Band-Aid on Donald Trump\u2019s thin skin? Since the opening days of the Trump presidency, Brendan Carr has … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}