Stop me if you've heard this one before; the Trump regime is cynically employing a rarely enacted policy from the 1960's to intimidate and attack folks critical of Donald Trump, despite that not being what the policy was, or has ever been, intended for. This time its Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who is targeting some of the largest media corporations in America for investigations under the "news distortion" policy, as part of what certainly looks like a larger plan to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who oppose Trump and the regime's fascist takeover:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/trumps-fcc-chair-invokes-rarely-enforced-news-distortion-policy-to-punish-media/
The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC’s news distortion policy
"Andrew Jay Schwartzman, an expert on media law and senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars that "the CBS complaint is utterly lacking in merit. What is alleged doesn't come within light-years of a violation of any FCC policy."
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an advocacy group, called Carr's investigation of CBS "a political stunt," an "illegitimate show trial," and an "unconstitutional abuse of regulatory authority." Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from Carr about what they call "bogus investigations" designed to "target and intimidate news organizations and broadcasters in violation of the First Amendment."
The CBS investigation was also lambasted in comments submitted by Christopher Terry, a professor of media law and ethics at the University of Minnesota, and J. Israel Balderas, a journalism professor at Elon University who is also a First Amendment attorney and a former FCC media advisor.
"The agency under Brendan Carr appears to be, based on the flimsiest of complaints, pursuing media outlets critical of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign, while ignoring similar complaints from the public about Trump-friendly media outlets," Terry and Balderas wrote. "Being the speech police is not the FCC's job, but enforcing any restrictions in a selective, much less a partisan, way is problematic, and likely to lead to extensive legal actions challenging FCC authority."
This is a long, granular, well-written article that's worth your time to read if you want to understand what Carr and the regime are trying to do here. The short-short version is that the new fascist chair of the FCC is using a rarely enforced policy that probably should have been cancelled years ago, and has almost universally been used in cases where a news outlet is caught staging or creating the news it wants to report, itself, to target Trump's critics in the media - in this case CBS, although the logic is more or less repeatable for any news outlet whose coverage the regime doesn't like. Furthermore, even if Carr weren't crassly weaponizing a sixty year old FCC policy to punish media outlets who (fairly) criticize Trump, the fact that this is purely about silencing critics of the regime in the media is laid bare by the Chairman's proposed solutions - pulling broadcast licenses; something that has literally *never* happened or been recommended before, even in the rare instances the news distortion policy was employed by the agency.
Look folks, I know the vast majority of people reading this don't care about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the election campaign, and lord knows that corporate media hasn't exactly covered itself in glory during the Trump administration; but this is a lot bigger than even a media corporation like CBS. By employing this policy to justify government harassment and targeting of Trump's critics, Carr is making himself and the regime, the finally arbiter of what does and doesn't constitute a "news distortion" in a way this rule was never intended to be used. If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there's no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won't just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either. The FCC has regulatory power over all broadcasters, and unless you want to see a world where the US government is trying to destroy media organizations for taking about the US history of slavery, why oil companies are not your friend, or even just showing trans and other gender-nonconforming characters in our entertainment, this needs to be resisted vigorously and stopped at all cost.
