Former FCC Officials Push To Kill Dated ‘News Distortion’ Rule Trump Abused To Bully CBS And ABC Into Feckless Compliance
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing).
Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored at the time, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and trampled the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.
CBS/Paramount was looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.
One of the FCC rules they abused during this whole process was the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy. The policy, created in 1949, gives the agency the power to punish media companies for ethical violations featuring a clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”
Ideally, this would be something like a media company taking a bribe from a company or public official to kill a story. The FCC has only actually used the rule eight times between 1969 and 2019, and few of those actions actually resulted in serious, substantive punishment.
Carr’s already grossly abused the rule twice; one to bully CBS into weakening its journalism, and once to try and bully ABC/Disney into pulling Jimmy Kimmel off the air for making fun of Republicans. Both times, Carr leveraged the rule to launch fake “investigations” into the companies to create the illusion he’s a very big boy doing very serious things.
In response to recent abuse of the rule by Trumpism, a coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for its elimination entirely. A bipartisan coalition of seven former FCC chairs and commissioners, including five Republicans, have filed a petition with the FCC urging for the elimination of the rule, saying it’s a threat to free speech and functional journalism:
“The News Distortion Policy gives any administration a tool to target outlets that provide unfavorable coverage. Chairman Carr’s recent threats against ABC and Disney demonstrate exactly this risk.
After ABC aired Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary on Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened to revoke the network’s licenses for alleged news distortion. The message was clear: Criticize those in power and face government retaliation.
As petitioners warn: What a Republican FCC Chairman can do today, a Democratic FCC Chairman could do tomorrow. The only solution is to eliminate this dangerous tool entirely.”
Of course, FCC boss Brendan Carr refuses to give up any power so this is a non-starter for him. Carr has made a big stink about eliminating all manner of “burdensome FCC regulations” as an act of “government efficiency.” As we’ve noted, this mostly involves important consumer protections and media consolidation limits his friends in the media and telecom sector don’t like.
Carr’s still keen to maintain FCC authority he can abuse to stifle speech. He’s also keen, as we saw with TikTok, to just make up authority the FCC doesn’t have whenever it suits him.
So it’s little surprise that his response to this petition from a bunch of his predecessors was to mock it, rather than live up to his promise to eliminate “burdensome FCC regulations.” Apparently that doesn’t matter when he has the power to punish media companies for their First Amendment-protected speech:
That’s Brendan Carr tweeting the following in response to a story about this petition:
How about no
On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.
And it is quite rich for the exact same people that pressured prior FCCS to censor conservatives through the news distortion policy to now object to the agency’s even-handed application of the law.
This is the hypocritical and logical inconsistent dance at the heart of Brendan Carr’s zealotry; he professes the FCC has absolutely no authority whatsoever when it comes to functional corporate oversight and consumer protection, yet somehow all the authority in the world to bully companies that are critical of the president or not racist and sexist enough for the president’s liking.
There’s another irony here; for generations, telecom and media giants routinely whined about the FCC “abusing its regulatory authority” and engaging in “radical extremism” any time it engaged in even the softest act of consumer protection. This was a cornerstone of “free market Libertarian” complaints. Remember the histrionics over some fairly basic, loophole-filled, net neutrality requirements?
Yet when the worst abuses of FCC authority finally did arrive, it came at the hands of far-right extremists.
That doesn’t mean we should abandon FCC oversight of corporate power (including media consolidation and diversity ownership rules) entirely, though I suspect that between good faith worries about abuse, and bad faith lobbying by corporate power, that’s the most likely outcome.
Filed Under: brendan carr, fcc, first amendmentm, free speech, journalism, news distortion, oversight, regulation
Companies: abc, cbs
Comments on “Former FCC Officials Push To Kill Dated ‘News Distortion’ Rule Trump Abused To Bully CBS And ABC Into Feckless Compliance”
Am I the only one who thinks that after this administration is finally removed (either because it left willingly or because we had to… Convince it to leave), we’ll either be removing or rewriting a bunch of rules/regs/laws? Though I have no idea how to balance discretion with legal specificity, sadly.
Re:
One major party has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they are willing to politicize and pervert the Department of Justice without limits posed by decorum, the need to keep competent personnel, or the consequences of having to abandon the presumption of good faith or respect of the judicial institutions.
Consequently the scope of prosecutorial discretion (intended to increase acceptance of the judicial system and its effectiveness against actual crimes with perpetrators and victims) has to be severely reined in.
Another case of “that’s why we cannot have good things”. As long as significant parts of the government cannot be expected to act in good faith, there just is no good tradeoff for discretion.
The less discretion is permitted to be a factor in prosecution, the less incentive is there in further perverting the judicial institutions.
Too bad it has come to that.
Re: Re:
I agree. I feel like the only way is to pass laws (and maybe even constitutional amendments) which severely lock down the federal government. A lot. I don’t really know of any other way to do it, but I’m also not a lawyer. Especially since I don’t see how else we could neuter that one political party without doing very very drastic things.
Re: Re: Re:
I’m not sure how far that gets you, if you end up with an administration willing to break the law. We have laws restricting like firing commissioners without cause, and they’re still just blowing through those. (And constitutional limits as well- things like power of the purse, emoluments, etc).
I think the only way to realistically prevent it, is to make sure that anyone who was involved this time ends up in prison. And make it very clear that anyone who wants to try it in the future will also end up in prison (preferably, before they get a trifecta. A huge part of our current issues is we didn’t deal with this last time). Trump, and a not insignificant portion of his first administration (and SCOTUS) should be in jail.
Someone like Carr should also be at personal legal risk. If someone abuses discretion this badly, the government shouldn’t just lose a court case. They should know they will go to jail, with no safety of a pardon/paycheck on the other end.
Once they’re in power, any law is ultimately just a piece of paper. Laws are only laws if people enforce them.
Re: Worse than you think
My opinion is the US as a functional country is done. We have 1 of 2 parties utterly divorced from ‘democracy’ but somehow we’re supposed to ‘respect’ them?
And that party is entrenched into power with only a minority. Minority rule, let alone one fueled by vengence and retribution, rarely lets go of that power peacefully.
“A house divided cannot stand”
Dems can win control of POTUS, House and Senate and literally nothing useful will get done b/c of the Senate. And that minority is still there simply waiting for the inevitable shift back to them.
Short of a post-Nixon order of magnitude shift in voting for a generation with Super Majorities to unfsck this country as well as the required Constitutional Amendments, it’s just a slow slide downward to Red and Blue American countries. Meanwhile China eats our lunch in any number of markets and technology.
The Future is Grim
The sad part about this whole story is that this is going to be the new normal for the United States. Say for the sake of argument that a leftist comes into power with the next Presidential Election, every single conservative will cry “so much for free speech loving left!” Democrats, the neoliberal party, after years of criticizing the far-right Republican Party, will do…nothing about undoing the damage because they worry more about decorum and civility and not being called a “hypocrite” then making lives better.
Brace yourselves everyone, its only going to get worse from here.
Re:
I would like to hope that we will have a much more ruthless democratic administration one of these days. Hopefully one that uses all these weapons Trump has created for himself against the Republican party. If there’s one thing these assholes need to learn, it’s that when you implement precedent to ignore the law, the other party can do it too.
JFC. the head of the FCC is quoting Doctor Evil to dismiss a news headline about their overreach on fucking Twitter.
There really are no more adults in the room, huh?
How is this policy not compelled speech? (Oh, and I won’t even bother addressing Carr’s continuing lies about conservatives being censored–by the govt. nor by anyone else.)
Carr has made a big stink about eliminating all manner of “burdensome FCC regulations”
We really need to be eliminating all manner of burdensome FCC regulators.
Rather than getting rid of it, we need to find ways to reapply it so that Fox news, and other right wing media, is constantly entangled by lawsuits and disallowances.