Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chairman, has launched investigations into CBS, Comcast, PBS, and NPR, targeting their diversity initiatives and news practices.

Most prominently, Carr has gone after CBS, demanding that journalistic powerhouse 60 Minutes produce an unedited transcript of their interview with Kamala Harris. Carr’s inquiry was based on a complaint filed by a conservative group, claiming a violation of the FCC’s “news distortion” policy. When the network produced the transcript, showing that its editing was not out of the industry norm and arguing that it was not deceptive, Carr didn’t dismiss the complaint but sent it off for public comment, delaying any resolution until well into March at the earliest.

Carr’s actions are in line with the Trump administration’s overall effort to threaten or punish the press, at a time when major media outlets are in a period of upheaval. In the case of CBS, the network’s parent company is seeking FCC approval for its acquisition by Skydance, and Carr has made clear that the 60 Minutes complaint likely would be part of the merger review.

That said, the “news distortion” policy is a rarely enforced provision that subjects broadcasters to punishment only “if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report.” But the FCC has long said its authority is narrow, noting that the agency is prohibited from engaging in censorship or infringing on the First Amendment.

“It is unusual for any news distortion complaint to get this far, particularly when it involves a simple editing choice,” said Robert Corn-Revere, former chief counsel to the FCC and a longtime First Amendment litigator.
“I don’t know of any case that rivals this in terms of the weakness of the claim,” said Corn-Revere, who is now with the group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Paradigm shift
Carr’s decision to pursue the complaint also is a contrast to the pushback during Trump’s first term. In 2017, when the president suggested that NBC should lose its license over some of its news content, then-FCC chair Ajit Pai made clear that the agency “under the law, does not have the authority to revoke the license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

Carr himself affirmed this view when two House Democrats, following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, queried distributors about their decisions to continue carrying Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax. At the time, Carr said 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.”

He also has spoken up before when it comes to specific attacks on the media, even from those who are now Trump allies. In 2022, when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of journalists, Carr told Deadline that although he wasn’t aware of the specifics, “One person should not get to decide who participates in the digital town square.”

Tom Wheeler, who served as FCC chairman during Barack Obama’s second term, said that, in the Trump era, Carr’s strategy seems to be to “attack, attack, attack. Keep [media outlets] on their back foot.”

He noted that Carr’s initiation of investigations are being done by him alone — not by the full commission — and that, in his missives to media outlets, “the verdict is being delivered in the letter.”

“The paradigm has shifted from the FCC having to prove allegations, to the FCC making allegations and CBS having to prove they are wrong,” Wheeler said.

Some have written off some of the criticism of Carr as the alarmism of the center-left media. But the chorus of voices who have sounded warnings includes the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and a former Republican chair of the FCC.

In contrast to some of the fiery figures elsewhere in the Trump
administration, led by the president himself, Carr in person is genial, a bit of a contrast to what you’d expect given the swagger on his social media feed. He is a longtime veteran of the FCC, having joined the agency staff in 2012 after working as a private appellate and litigation attorney. He rose to the position of general counsel at the agency, before Trump nominated him to fill a vacancy on the commission in 2017.

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