Show at the FCC

Brendan Carr stages a Trumpian show at the FCC

For years, he was a low-key conservative policy player. Now he’s using an entire agency to wage Trump’s battles.

By John Hendel

Four months into his tenure as head of America’s top communications regulator, Brendan Carr appears to be running a Trumpian playbook to transform a long-independent agency.

Immediately after being promoted by President Donald Trump to chair the Federal Communications Commission, on Jan. 20, Carr launched investigations into top media companies, including NPR, PBS and Comcast.

Though the bulk of the FCC’s work is regulating nuts-and-bolts issues to do with telecom, TV and radio networks and broadband internet, Carr used his power as chair to invite thousands of public comments critiquing a single “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that personally affronted Trump — a direct incursion into news content that hasn’t been seen in decades.

He has also abandoned the FCC’s posture as an independent regulator in favor of an openly personal embrace of Trump. Though picked by the president, FCC chairs of both parties for years have charted an independent course, launching investigations and passing rules that affect billions of dollars in corporate investment while being careful to operate at a distance from the White House.

No longer: In April, alongside officials at the Justice Department, Carr donned a golden pin featuring Donald Trump’s face. He’s become a familiar presence at Mar-a-Lago, and has flown with the president on Air Force One.

As he picks those norm-busting fights with the mainstream media, Carr is more quietly delivering on big deregulation promises to business interests. These moves are less headline-grabbing, but possibly more transformational.

Carr recently said he wants the FCC to get into the business of online speech, potentially making the commission a major enforcer against the content moderation decisions of the Big Tech platforms like Meta and Google. And despite his stepped-up scrutiny of some legacy networks and shows, he also wants to scale back government restrictions on the owners of individual radio and TV stations.

His tactics are a window into how even relatively stolid, independent Washington agencies are being transformed under the second Trump administration — expanding their remit, rewarding favored players and lending their weight to Trump’s highly personal fights.

“It may have been done under previous administrations, but not to this extent,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told POLITICO, of Carr’s pressure on media outlets. “It is the cumulative effect here that is so striking, the number and frequency of these efforts to intimidate and threaten, which is deeply dangerous to the broadcasters, the print outlets — they all have a stake here.”

Carr’s supporters see his instincts as especially well attuned to the Trump era. Nathan Leamer, a former FCC aide and close Carr ally, told POLITICO he sees Carr as embracing a new political desire to use the FCC’s power in broader ways, including “some things that are outside of what we would treat in the telecom world as those regular boundaries.”

Carr and the FCC did not respond to requests for interviews for this story, including questions about mounting criticisms surrounding the First Amendment implications of his investigations.

Carr has vigorously defended his approach when talking to POLITICO at events and monthly FCC press conferences, however. He framed his deregulation push, for example, as a way to support the business and community sensibilities of local TV stations.

“We don’t want local broadcasters to ultimately go the way of newspapers,” Carr told POLITICO at his April 28 news conference. “I want strong local broadcasters who feel empowered to serve their local communities.”

Carr’s next few months will test how a regulator in Trump’s Washington balances the competing interests of the MAGA political base, traditional GOP regulatory goals and the direct, unpredictable attention of the president himself.

As they move from saber-rattling to actual policy, Carr’s gambits could crash against the First Amendment and the courts, and even risk divides among Republicans — not all of whom are eager to see the FCC playing a role in Trump’s culture war.

A major test of Carr’s agenda will begin as soon as this month. So far, Carr has been functioning without a full commission, pushing the bully-pulpit powers of the chair to the limit. Once the Senate votes to confirm Trump’s nominee for a third GOP FCC commissioner, Carr will gain the working majority he needs to push through new rules, merger votes and even punishments.

That will raise the question of how far he presses some of his controversial probes and attempts to expand the agency’s jurisdiction.

Carr himself is seen in Washington as a close student of the limits and possibilities of the FCC’s power. He is also a study in Trump-era transformation. He began his career as a seemingly mild-mannered traditional Republican, a conservative lawyer worried about government overreach over telecom networks, and espousing regulatory restraint.

He took a staunchly hands-off approach to the media itself: As late as 2021, he argued that 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 last few years have seen both his politics and his persona transform. Since Trump first nominated him as an FCC commissioner in 2017, Carr has become adept at popular messaging, waging multiple campaigns that won popular conservative appeal and a widespread following on X. (He has 168,000 followers watching his plucky, familiar and sometimes combative posts; the previous chair had a quarter that number.)

In 2020, during Trump’s first term, he rallied behind Trump’s push to rein in tech giants, claiming that liberal politics were skewing their content moderation policies. He later supported Capitol Hill’s campaign against TikTok, warning that the app posed a national security threat. (He’s been quieter since Trump changed his view and decided to save the app.) He’s pushed tech giants to pay for broadband subsidies.

More recently, Carr found a powerful supporter in Elon Musk, who embraced him as Carr defended the tech billionaire’s interests and pushed for an expanded role for the kind of satellite broadband technology Musk sells via his Starlink service. He even wrote a chapter for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 arguing that Washington should support space-based broadband services, naming Starlink. The two posed together last August in a photo that Carr posted on X with a flattering tribute to Musk.

His style has become more ideologically pugnacious as chair than as commissioner. Since Trump announced plans to make Carr his chair in November, Carr has used conservative media like Fox and right-wing influencers to amplify Trump’s agenda and underscore priorities like “smashing the censorship cartel.”

Leamer sees this as a regulator leaning deftly into the political moment: “He’s demonstrated a really solid ability to balance sort of the viral opportunities that come around with the chairmanship, but also at the same time getting into the nitty gritty,” he said.

Carr’s appetite to delve into content appears to be growing. On April 16, he slammed Comcast news outlets for how they covered the Salvadoran man at the heart of a Trump administration deportation battle, suggesting they violated the law by misleadingly characterizing facts of a high-profile case. “Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest,” Carr wrote. “News distortion doesn’t cut it.”

Comcast’s outlets include not just NBC, whose broadcast programming faces some content-related FCC regulation, but also MSNBC, whose cable TV programming has typically fallen outside the agency’s authority.

Carr has also threatened to use the FCC’s leverage over mergers in a novel way: to force companies to abandon their diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Eliminating DEI is a priority that Trump enshrined in executive orders, and his White House has been enforcing it in numerous ways across the government and in the private sector.

With various merger deals now pending, including the proposed $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger, Carr has said he will make those corporate practices a factor in reviewing (and potentially holding up or killing) transactions.

He’s already counting successes: Carr revealed on Friday that Verizon is eliminating its DEI policies, and the FCC ruled favorably on its acquisition of Frontier Communications right afterward.

Unlike many in Trump world, however, Carr hasn’t declared a personal war on the press. He revels in a kind of wonky showmanship, and operates with subtle cues attuned to the different audiences he’s speaking to, including longtime familiar players in Washington, and reporters both national and local. Before gaveling in his first FCC open meeting in February, he joined the press table to make informal conversation about his recent ascent to the top of an 1,800-foot broadcast tower in Alabama.

Businesses, too, see more than one side of Carr — including the friendly traditional deregulator of 10 years ago. He has slashed rules to make it easier to build broadband networks and launched a docket called “In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete” to collect ideas for future deregulation.

Carr and his allies frame his agenda as a new focus on “fairness.” On cable news and at events, he says Democrats simply aren’t used to impartial governance, arguing that they weaponized government in their favor, and he’s now operating under the same norms — pivoting the agency to give similar space to conservative ideas and values. He’s also repeatedly accused Democrats of their own overreach on content, complaining about past instances like the Biden administration pressuring social media platforms to remove posts during the pandemic.

Overall, his chairmanship can be seen as a tacit campaign against national media, which his supporters argue have long been biased against conservatives, and in favor of local stations, whose owners’ politics have sometimes veered more conservative, and won Trump’s support in the past.

“Provided that these local broadcasters are actually pursuing and serving their public interest obligation, not fighting it, then I’m happy to be a very strong ally for local broadcasters, and pushing back on the overreach that comes from Hollywood and New York programming that ABC, CBS and NBC are pushing,” Carr told POLITICO in March.

To worried observers, his campaign against certain news outlets in particular jumps the barriers that traditionally kept the FCC out of the business of what the media broadcasts.

A group of 18 organizations wrote the chair in March, “alarmed by politically motivated pressure exerted on digital platforms, broadcasters, and journalists who exercise protected speech that the current administration disfavors.” Three Senate Democrats issued a similar warning, as did senior House Democrats, who requested an inspector general probe into whether resources are being wasted and the law being skirted over launching “bogus” investigations.

Even some conservatives, like Grover Norquist, have urged Carr to back off, worrying his “60 Minutes” pursuit would “constitute regulatory overreach and advance precedent that can be weaponized by future FCCs.”

House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) invoked North Korea during one hearing, saying: “Trump is unleashing his sycophant FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on every news group whose stories he doesn’t approve of.”

The National Association of Broadcasters — a longtime Washington lobbying powerhouse that normally might rally to the defense of news targets like CBS — has played it both ways on Carr.

After initially keeping quiet, it criticized Carr’s probe of CBS’ “60 Minutes” in written comments this March, warning that “broadcasters should not be looking over their shoulders.” But the same day, the group cheered Carr on social media for his “support of local TV and radio stations” in the form of potentially loosened media ownership rules.

Broadcasters see Carr as a way to get regulatory relief for their industry, which may blunt the edge of the industry’s criticism. They want Carr to kill longstanding ownership limits, such as the rule capping a TV station owner’s audience reach at 39 percent of American households. And they need an ally for implementing new broadcast TV technology. This is all existentially necessary, broadcasters say, to compete against Big Tech — and so far, Carr seems receptive.

Just weeks earlier, when asked in person, CEO Curtis LeGeyt had declined to offer any specific critiques of Carr’s probes and maintained that any concerns are “not unique to this administration.” Instead, he identified past worries during the Obama and Biden administrations, such as the previous Democratic chair welcoming public comment on whether to deny a Fox broadcast station’s license renewal amid complaints about how Fox management approached the 2020 presidential election.

Carr’s campaign against “60 Minutes” is the agency’s most overt entanglement of politics, regulation and Trumpian loyalty test. Trump himself sued CBS less than a week before Election Day, and in February, upped his demands to $20 billion. The two sides are reportedly beginning mediation.

One of Carr’s first actions as FCC chair this January was to revive the Center for American Rights’ news distortion complaint against “60 Minutes,” filed in October, for its fall interview with then Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

The complaint alleged that CBS had misleadingly edited the interview, showing two different parts of Harris’ answer in a promo and in the aired interview — a practice that falls within standard journalistic discretion, but a source of outcry among conservatives who saw it as an attempt to shield Harris from scrutiny. (“60 Minutes” says the full transcript, released this year following Carr’s pressure, plainly shows the broadcast “was not doctored or deceitful.”)

Trump has been watching approvingly, sharing screenshots of Carr’s regulatory moves and in February writing “CBS should lose its license.” Musk, for his part, wrote that “60 Minutes” journalists “deserve a long prison sentence” for the Harris interview.

Trump name-checked Carr explicitly in an April 13 Truth Social post, expressing hope that the “highly respected” FCC leader “will impose the maximum fines and punishment” on CBS and yank their FCC licensing.

Although as a network, CBS doesn’t have a license, its affiliate TV stations do. Speaking to reporters after the April 28 open meeting, Carr said that license revocation has “long been viewed as the regulatory death penalty, so it’s a pretty high bar for me to go down that path. But it is one of the options.”

In the case of CBS and “60 Minutes,” however, the FCC’s potential leverage goes considerably further. The network’s parent company, Paramount Global, also needs FCC approval for its proposed $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Carr has said he sees the “60 Minutes” complaint and the merger as intertwined. (He later demurred, telling reporters the matters are separate.)

This has triggered blunt criticism of Carr as being openly in the tank for Trump. House Energy and Commerce Democrats Frank Pallone, Doris Matsui and Yvette Clarke called the FCC investigation “an obvious effort to create additional leverage in Trump’s settlement negotiations and encourage payment in a sham lawsuit in exchange for favorable regulatory outcome,” in their March 31 letter.

In late March, after thousands of comments poured in on the complaint, Carr told reporters he saw no reason to drop it. “Personally, I’ve not reviewed comments at this point,” he told POLITICO after the April 28 open meeting. “All options remain on the table. That continues to be an open investigation.”

FCC spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment on Democrats’ accusations of conflict of interest. After the April meeting, Carr told reporters Trump’s settlement talks have “nothing to do” with his investigation. The White House declined to comment.

“If there are broadcasters out there that don’t want to have to comply with their public interest obligations, the FCC’s address is 45 L Street Northeast, and they can mail in their license, and we can put it to a higher and better use,” Carr told POLITICO.

For all the noise, it’s not clear how far the commission can legally take Carr’s saber rattling about companies’ content policies.

The First Amendment provides companies generous protections from government crackdowns over their content. And until he secures a Republican majority on the commission — Trump nominee Olivia Trusty is still awaiting Senate confirmation — Carr also can’t put any of his more controversial, partisan plans to a vote just yet.

Courts are also raising questions about the FCC’s in-house enforcement powers, which could neuter Carr’s ability to punish companies under investigation.

Eventually, courts could intervene, especially as Carr tries to stretch his jurisdiction to take on new targets like YouTube TV or tech companies. Carr wants the FCC to curb online platforms’ content moderation by re-interpreting the protections they enjoy from lawsuits over the content they host. “If you’re going to censor,” Carr said at DOJ headquarters in April, “the FCC can step in.”

Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has peppered Carr’s staff with questions about the various probes, including of CBS, in March — though Democrats have little power to halt Carr’s actions while in the minority in both houses, as well as soon on the FCC itself.

As FCC chair, Carr can open investigations unilaterally, without holding votes. Democratic Commissioner Geoffrey Starks plans to leave this spring, and given Trump’s recent firing of other agencies’ Democratic members, it’s not clear he’ll nominate a replacement.

That’s left Anna Gomez, the FCC’s junior Democrat, attempting to sound the alarm. “I’ve heard from broadcasters who are already telling their reporters to be careful about how they cover stories because they fear government retribution,” Gomez told reporters after Carr’s first commission meeting. In late April, she launched what she’s calling a First Amendment tour to “challenge government censorship and control.”

These effects seem to be broadly felt. During an April 27 broadcast of “60 Minutes,” CBS veteran Scott Pelley registered an on-air complaint about tighter corporate oversight of news programming, apparently due to the looming merger. The previous week, longtime executive producer Bill Owens resigned amid this newfound pressure from executives. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” Pelley said. “No one here is happy about it.”

GOP Commissioner Nathan Simington, by contrast, downplayed concerns — and argued that everything Carr is doing fit within historical norms for the agency.

“We’re a long way from Nixon calling in the network heads into his office to lean on them,” Simington said in an interview. “We’re a long way from the weaponization of the Fairness Doctrine that we saw under JFK. There’s some bad history, certainly, with the executive branch leaning on broadcasters. And I think if we look at historical precedent in that area, we’re so far away from any of that.”

And in a mirror image of liberals’ anxiety about a crackdown, conservative activists see Carr as exactly the kind of reformer that the FCC has needed for years. They even frame it in terms of restoring media trust.

“What do we do under the public interest standard when two-thirds of the public doesn’t trust the people we regulate? You can imagine if the Department of Transportation had a poll saying two-thirds of Americans don’t trust the airlines,” said Daniel Suhr, who heads the Center for American Rights, the organization that filed the “60 Minutes” complaint in October.

“A large part of that is having media institutions that reflect the country as a whole, and not just the lead opinion you might find in New York or LA,” added Suhr, stressing that he believes the government can usher in these changes “without in any way creating some sort of content police force.”

As part of the Skydance-Paramount merger, Suhr has urged the FCC to focus on the ideological makeup of CBS’ corporate officers, the geographic locales of its reporting and editorial operations and the creation of a possible ombudsman. Suhr also filed a new complaint at the FCC on April 21, urging Carr to crackdown on ABC, CBS and NBC for their alleged biased coverage of the Trump administration’s deportation legal fight (the center generously quoted from Carr’s own words on social media).

Not everyone is so sure that Carr’s balancing act will ultimately pay off, even for his Republican supporters.

Daniel Lyons, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Boston College law professor, had hoped the FCC chair would stick to conventional telecom fare and avoid what he sees as culture war theatrics.

“The fact that instead the chairman is focused on investigating the public broadcasting system and moving forward on the CBS complaint looks to be more like grabbing headlines at the expense of that more important, basic work,” Lyons lamented in an interview.