FCC Chair Threatens to Revoke Broadcasters’ Licenses Over Iran War Coverage
Critics say Brendan Carr is positioning himself as a national censor. His threats to broadcasters covering Iran fit the bill.
[Ashley Ahn in The New York Times]
Seems bad:
“Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened on Saturday to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the war with Iran, his latest move in a campaign to stomp out what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts.”
The irony is that it was the FCC under Reagan in 1987 that withdrew the fairness doctrine, a policy that had required broadcasters to reflect different viewpoints on controversial matters of public interest since 1949. If the current FCC felt like there was a persistent liberal bias, they could reinstate it. Regardless, painting US broadcast media as overwhelmingly liberal is a stretch in a post-Bari Weiss CBS era; perhaps Carr sees a problem with there being any liberal-leaning media.
Only free-to-air channels require broadcast licenses, so in practice this affects a minority of news consumers. Most people get their news via the internet or cable news these days. But there’s clearly an intended chilling effect here, and obviously there are other routes to get to newsrooms beyond broadcast TV: merger approvals, adverse regulations, and so on. It’s a threat to the entire US news media in a country that claims to treasure free speech.
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