Former FCC Officials Line Up To Blast Brendan Carr’s Lawless Censorship Of ABC

from the policing-the-speech-police dept

A bipartisan roster of former top-level FCC officials have submitted a filing to the Trump FCC blasting the agency’s ongoing violations of the First Amendment and urging it to terminate its phony “investigations” into ABC — including the unprecedented early ownership review of the company’s broadcast licenses.

In the filing, former FCC officials allied under the banner of the Protect Democracy Project outline how the early “ownership review” of ABC’s eight broadcast licenses is really just a pretense to punish ABC and Disney for broadcasting speech the Trump administration doesn’t like, the coalition calling it “a grave violation of both the Communications Act and the Constitution.”

A companion announcement features numerous FCC officials lining up to express their disgust at Brendan Carr and his often-illegal assault on the First Amendment.

“Chairman Carr seems to be laboring under the ill-conceived notion that broadcasters have only partial
rights to free speech under the First Amendment,” said Mark Fowler, a Republican who served as
Chairman of the FCC from 1981 to 1987. “Just because the FCC issues licenses doesn’t make it the
speech police. With this senseless early renewal proceeding, Carr is demonstrating that he has
completely lost touch not just with the role of the FCC, but also with his own job description.”

Earlier this year, Trump Republicans were upset that The View hosted Texas Democratic hopeful James Talarico. That triggered an entire fake “investigation” and a threatened revocation of ABC’s broadcast licenses by Carr, who falsely claimed the show had violated the FCC’s dated and irrelevant “equal time” rule requiring that TV stations give equal time to political candidates from both parties.

It apparently didn’t matter that Carr’s threats were empty, that any legal case would be laughed out of court on First Amendment grounds, that Carr actively avoids enforcing such laws for right wing radio, that Carr had worked with Trump-friendly broadcasters to concoct a conspiracy to make ABC look guilty, or that The View had clearly been exempt from the FCC’s “equal time” rules since 2002.

The FCC has been engaged in several other simultaneous phony investigations of ABC, hoping to punish the company for journalism and comedy critical of the president. The efforts are legally unsupportable assaults on free speech and the First Amendment designed not really to go to court, but to signal to media companies that there are costly legal headaches in store if they joke about, criticize, or simply just platform journalism that’s honest about Trump.

Several of the same former FCC officials participating in this coalition filed a petition with the FCC late last year, urging it to rescind the agency’s news distortion policy, a tool Chairman Carr has abused to try and trample free speech and journalistic freedom.

“This proceeding is an effort to punish ABC and Disney for poorly disguised political reasons,” said
Rachelle Chong, a Republican who served as Commissioner of the FCC from 1994 to 1997. “The early
review and the allegations are unusual in a typical FCC license review which suggests it is more about a
desire to silence speech.”

While the effectiveness of these threats have waned in parallel with Trump’s sagging health and political power; they’ve still been embarrassingly effective at times. The View, for example, has shied away from hosting any politicians at all to avoid further agitating the kakistocracy. And ABC in late 2024 paid Trump $15 million to settle a baseless lawsuit the company would have likely won.

This latest filing was signed by other former FCC officials including Kathryn C. Brown, Rachelle B. Chong, Jerald N. Fritz, Rosemary Harold, William T. Lake, Ruth Milkman, Dennis R. Patrick, Peter Pitsch, Alfred C. Sikes, Gloria Tristani, Tom Wheeler, and Christopher J. Wright.

The filing and complaint are curiously lacking in statements from Democrats, who have been a feckless no show when it comes to competent media reform for the better part of a quarter century. At the same time, many Republicans who have proven solid on free speech issues during authoritarianism, have quietly supported the administration’s assault on the regulatory state and what’s left of competent corporate oversight, the impact of which will have very different, but very fatal, reverberations for decades.

A broad array of other Republican-leaning groups, including the Center for Individual Freedom, Citizens Against Government Waste, and Americans for Tax Reform, also filed complaints this week at the FCC over its ongoing harassment of ABC, showing just how ideologically alone Brendan Carr has become as he wages a sad and desperate war on the First Amendment at the behest of a bumbling tyrant.

Filed Under: bipartisan, brendan carr, censorship, comedy, fcc, first amendment, free speech, journalism

Companies: abc, disney