Brendan Carr: ‘i Don't View The Fcc As The Speech Police’

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr rejects accusations that he’s wielding his agency’s power over broadcast media to punish President Donald Trump’s critics.

But he also defends his aggressive launching of probes, enforcement actions and license reviews against targets including NBC, “60 Minutes,” Disney and “The View” — despite the alarm his actions are provoking among detractors in both parties.

“I don't view the FCC as the speech police,” Carr told POLITICO’s Dasha Burns during an interview this week for her podcast “The Conversation.” (The full video was posted online Friday.) At the same time, though, “we should be appropriately applying and enforcing the laws that Congress passed,” he added — including a nearly century-old requirement that broadcasters use their exclusive, federally granted licenses to advance the “public interest.”

“I think in the media space in particular, the FCC over the last 20 or 30 years really backed away from the regulatory framework that Congress put in place,” Carr said. “And I don't think it's been a good thing, either in terms of our job of administering the law or the outcome that we're seeing across the media sector.”

He added that public polling bears out his warnings that much of the news media has squandered the public’s trust. He believes his agency can play a role in counteracting that trend, including by invoking long-unused rules against “news distortion,” requiring balance in interviews with political candidates, and bolstering the power of TV station owners to override networks’ programming decisions.

“Fifteen percent of people would eat gas station sushi,” Carr said. “Only 8 percent of people say they have a great deal of trust” in the media.

His efforts have nonetheless stirred objections from Democrats and Republicans alike — including Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who told POLITICO in April that “it is not the FCC’s role to be the speech police.” He made those remarks following Carr’s decision to bring Disney’s eight prized ABC station licenses up for early renewal, a proceeding that has prompted pro-Trump advocates to call for the agency to deny them.

Carr said last week that the license review will probably include consideration of the network’s decision not to air Trump’s July 16 prime time address alleging election fraud. The president lobbed that threat against both ABC and NBC during the very same speech.

In his interview this week, Carr argued that enforcing public interest obligations on broadcasters, established by decades of Supreme Court precedent, “is not censorship and does not run afoul of the First Amendment.”

Carr, a 14-year agency veteran who first interned at the FCC while in law school, spoke carefully about Trump’s influence, defending the president’s right to criticize the media while arguing that tradition preserves the integrity of the commission’s oversight of broadcast media.

On the other hand, Carr said a recent Supreme Court ruling has made it clear that the FCC is no longer independent of White House command. And legally, he maintains, it was never as independent as many people had long assumed.

“The president has every right in the world, including a First Amendment right, to express his views, to push back on media,” Carr remarked. “I think you see him do that all the time. He's incredibly transparent. He's incredibly direct.”

Carr has made it clear he supports the president — for example by donning a pin adorned with Trump’s face and, as Burns notes, drinking from a mug that portrays the FCC chair as a pit bull on the president’s leash. He has also golfed and visited with Trump in ways that break with the tradition of past agency chairs.

“Look, there's no question that I'm broadly aligned with President Trump,” he said.

Carr declined to detail his interactions with Trump, however, and — despite repeated prodding from Burns — did not say whether any limits should exist for the president’s ability to direct FCC probes against broadcasters he dislikes. The law and process, Carr argued, safeguard the agency’s regulatory moves from any concerns about abuses of power.

“Whenever we make a decision at the FCC, we have to explain the basis for it,” Carr said. “So what's the record evidence? What's the law say? What's the facts say? And if it's not grounded in those things, there's bases that people can appeal and overturn. So all of our decisions are going to ultimately be driven by the facts and the record before us.”

Carr’s scrutiny of ABC has generated particular controversy, with dual proceedings underway weighing whether to renew the eight broadcast licenses and whether “The View” should be forced to give comparable airtime to the rivals of political candidates it interviews. The stations subject to the license review include those serving major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia.

ABC has accused Carr of playing politics and pushed back in both proceedings, asking its viewers to defend the network. More than 153,000 filings have filled the FCC’s ABC license docket.

Burns questioned the timing of the Disney license review, noting that the FCC's action came one day after the president and Melania Trump had called for the removal of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he had made about the first lady. Carr repeated his insistence that the review stemmed from Disney's evasive responses to an investigation of its diversity practices.

He said he hasn’t made a final decision about how to proceed with the licenses.

Former FCC leaders of both parties decried the Disney license review in a joint filing Tuesday.

“This renewal proceeding is the latest attack in a sustained campaign by Chairman Carr and the Trump administration of threatening legal sanctions against licensees whose speech President Trump dislikes,” wrote the ex-officials, including Reagan-era Chairs Mark Fowler and Dennis Patrick and Obama-era Chair Tom Wheeler. “And although the purported justification for the early renewal proceeding is that it is in aid of a Commission investigation into unlawful employment discrimination, it is in fact an assault on free speech disguised as regulatory process.”

Although conservative groups such as the Media Research Center urged Carr to deny the ABC license renewals in June, some state and federal Republican lawmakers have since defended their home-state TV stations.

The license renewal is “critical,” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) wrote in one of multiple letters supporting ABC stations. Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) made similar pleas about their local stations. So did John Curran, the Republican Senate leader of the Illinois state legislature.

Democrats across the country have also filed letters defending local stations, often with blunter attacks on Carr. One letter from House Democrats in California said Carr’s “own words make it abundantly clear that he has long planned, and now is taking direct action, to unconstitutionally use the powers of the FCC to attack constitutionally protected speech.”

In his POLITICO interview, Carr repeatedly emphasized that broadcasters’ licenses confer distinct public interest obligations that don’t apply to cable TV or the internet — and that he viewed his use of the agency’s tools as part of a quest to boost trust in local media.

Carr also acknowledged some tensions particularly among conservatives regarding his stance toward the media, which includes “a more populist approach that’s skeptical of concentrations of power” such as the national networks. He framed his agenda as combining traditional GOP deregulatory instincts with a pursuit of “common-sense regulations.”

“What we've been trying to do is you take a little bit of dereg, a little bit of reg, you put it together, and we make telecom great again,” Carr said.

He said he’s not worried about blowback.

“You’re going to be villainized,” he said, adding, “You just have to feel very confident in the decisions you're making.”

Carr said he’s tried to learn from the mistakes of past GOP agency chairs who hesitated to wield the FCC’s full authority, telling themselves that “we can't legislate, or we can't regulate, because one day Democrats will be back.”

“My view is not to take the gavel and weaponize it,” he said. “But my view is also not to take the gavel and bury it in the sand.”