FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s meddling in broadcast journalism contradicts his own avowed views
You may have heard that Skydance Media is merging with Paramount, which owns CBS. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved that $8 billion deal last week, its chairman bragged that the agency had extracted concessions that would bring “significant changes” to the network’s journalism.
Brendan Carr, a Republican whom President Donald Trump appointed as the FCC’s chairman, thinks the agency has a responsibility to ensure that TV journalists cover the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” But that role is precluded by the First Amendment, as Carr himself once seemed to recognize.
Paramount needed the FCC’s approval for the merger because it entailed the transfer of broadcast licenses held by CBS-owned stations. The FCC blessed those transfers just a few weeks after Paramount announced that it would pay $16 million to settle a laughable lawsuit in which Trump claimed that CBS had committed consumer fraud by editing a pre-election interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris to make her sound less “dumb.”
Although Carr thought that interview justified an investigation of CBS for “broadcast news distortion,” he insisted that Trump’s lawsuit had nothing to do with the FCC’s review of the Paramount/Skydance deal. But the concessions he highlighted in explaining the agency’s decision are at least as troubling as the appearance that Paramount paid protection money.
Carr noted that Skydance had promised to “ensure that the new company’s programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.” Skydance also said it would “adopt measures” t
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