Brendan Carr Is A Shameless Liar: Now Pretending He Didn’t Break The Law And Censor Comedians Critical Of His Dim, Unpopular Boss

Now Carr is busy making the rounds, doing damage control and trying to pretend he did nothing wrong. At the Concordia Summit this week, Carr lied and claimed that his effort to cancel Kimmel, opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike, was some sort of Democratic fabrication:

“There’s a lot of Democrats out there that are engaged in a campaign of projection and distortion. The distortion is they’re completely misrepresenting the work of the FCC and what we’ve been doing. I saw there’s a letter from some Senate Democrats that said the FCC threatened to revoke the license of Disney and ABC if they didn’t fire Jimmy Kimmel, and that did not happen in any way, shape, or form.”

The letter that got Carr’s attention was the letter three House Representatives sent to FCC Inspector General Fara Damelin, urging her to do her fucking job given Carr’s radical behaviors not only violate the law and FCC rules, they’re wasting huge sums of agency resources (weird for an FCC boss who simply can’t shut up about his quest for agency efficiency, at least as it pertains to consumer protections).

Like most law-trampling authoritarians, Carr has concocted paper thin legal justifications for Trump’s free speech violations, demolition of consumer protections, and other unpopular policies. Legal justifications that would be shredded easily if the Democratic party, major institutions, and prominent media giants (like CBS and ABC) had the faintest hint of any ethical backbone.

For example when Carr abused the FCC merger approval process to demand Verizon to be more sexist and racist — he made the legally incoherent claim that the company’s bare-bones inclusivity efforts ran afoul of the Communication Act’s discrimination language and were somehow discriminatory against white people. That’s absolute fucking gibberish by any standard.

Carr’s offered up similarly flimsy justifications for his destruction of FCC efforts to address longstanding racism in U.S. fiber broadband deployment, despite the fact that the Trump administration’s destruction of the Digital Equity Act (a law passed by Congress mandating the FCC take action on long-proven discrimination in broadband deployment and pricing) was illegal.

When Carr violated FCC rules to pressure ABC, CBS, and NBC to back away from journalism critical of the President, he tried to flip logic on its head by invoking the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” rule, a little-enforced rule generally reserved for media companies that do things like take bribes to kill harmful stories. Had ABC or CBS had the slightest ethical integrity, they could have destroyed these allegations in court. Instead, they threw millions of dollars to curry favor with our dim king.

And here, Carr is desperately trying to pretend that the pressure he clearly applied on ABC affiliates to trample free speech were all about his desperate love of “local community”:

“What I’ve been very clear in the context of the Kimmel episode is the FCC, and myself in particular, have expressed no view on the ultimate merits had something like that been filed, what our take would be one way or the other. But one of the things we’re trying to do as a general matter at the FCC is to empower local TV stations to serve the needs of the local communities.”

This feigned love of local communities here is particularly obnoxious given his plans to rubber stamp a massive wave of new local media consolidation, the likes of which has already decimated quality local broadcast TV journalism in the U.S. And because of his efforts to destroy federal consumer protection, leaving those locals at the whims of shitty robocallers, predatory telecom giants, and regional monopolies like Comcast.

Like most of the pudding-brained sycophants in Donald Trump’s orbit, Brendan Carr will say or do literally anything to try and support whatever shitty, radical, or unpopular idea that pops into Donald Trump’s head on any given day. And because major U.S. institutions and corporations are so corrupt and feckless, it’s been relatively easy for him, so far, to leverage the thinnest fucking legal justifications imaginable.

In the case of Kimmel, Carr repeatedly levied direct, obvious threats against broadcasters who air criticism of President Trump with statements like “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He directly demanded that Disney “take action” on Kimmel “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” His comments have been clearly construed as illegal, dangerous threats by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Just last week Carr went on the podcast of right wing fake journalist Benny Johnson to directly spell out his plan to pressure ABC broadcast affiliates into taking a giant, steaming dump on the First Amendment:

“There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters and, frankly, I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on [NBC owner] Comcast and Disney and say, “Listen, we are going to preempt, 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.” Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities.”

In short, he told Disney and its local broadcast affiliates to censor a comedian critical of the President and then pretend it was some sort of community service to do so. That’s still illegal, regardless of whether Carr tries to dress the censorship up as helpful for rural Americans. Recall that while ABC itself has backed off the Kimmel suspension, local right wing broadcast affiliates are still “pre-empting” him.

Carr’s not even consistent on the subject of the FCC’s ability to pull broadcaster licenses. You might recall that when media reform activists urged the Biden FCC to pull a FOX Philly affiliate’s license for repeatedly airing election conspiracy lies (something the Biden FCC never seriously considered despite very clear harm to local communities), Carr acted like this was the most radical idea he’d ever heard.

You never really get any sense that Brendan Carr, the man, actually believes in much of anything beyond his own career opportunities within the soggy ranks of the MAGA kakistocracy. His “beliefs” (like his dedication to a TikTok ban, or his past adoration of the First Amendment) ebb and flow depending on the whims of our mad, idiot king. And like most of Trumpism, he’s incapable of introspection and will clearly take all the wrong lessons from Kimmel’s return, ensuring more dangerous, bad decisions to come.

Filed Under: brendan carr, cancel culture, censorship, comedy, fcc, free speech, jimmy kimmel, media, media consolidation

Companies: abc, disney