Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr stuck to his guns in the face of relentless criticism from Democrats, telling a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that elitist media organizations can’t gobble up limited federal broadband while freely distorting major news stories for the left.
Following at least six Democrat attempts to misrepresent Carr’s work flagrantly, Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX) gave Carr a chance to explain broadcaster obligations without further incurious grandstanding from Democrats. Carr explained why the FCC has a role in ensuring broadcasters serve the public interest:
"So broadcasters are unique among all other distributors of information or even data. They have a license given them by the federal government that necessarily means the government has excluded other voices that might have wanted to use those airwaves, and so they have an obligation to stand not just in their own shoes, but in the shoes of their entire community of license. And that means they have to operate differently than a cable channel or a podcast or social media.”
Carr’s public interest statement followed a barrage of Democratic attacks, many centered around his condemnations of or investigations into scandals at ABC and CBS. After TPUSA Founder Charlie Kirk was killed, comedian Jimmy Kimmel engaged in news distortion by claiming that Kirk was assassinated by a right-winger. Kimmel made this remark despite the fact that a leftist dating a biological woman claiming to be a man was arrested for the murder. Following this, a large number of ABC affiliates dropped Kimmel’s show and Carr denounced Kimmel’s lie. ABC temporarily suspended Kimmel in September 2025.
Separately, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a promo for a Kamala Harris interview that included a word salad answer from her on the Israeli–Hamas conflict. But when the interview came out, CBS provided viewers with a far more presentable and concise response that had the additional benefit of making Harris more palatable to defecting pro-Hamas Democrats. CBS’s parent company Paramount, has since settled.
In both cases, MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider made clear that Carr was correct to speak up and that the FCC has just cause to regulate broadcasters with a near-monopolistic grasp on limited federally owned spectrum. Schneider has pointed out that such free access to spectrum is effectively a massive public subsidy and comes with obligations that cable channels like CNN, Fox News or MSNBC do not have.
MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris further explained, “In a nutshell, Carr appears to have just been doing his job. For the longest time, legacy media outlets and their broadcast affiliates have been allowed to air content that serves only a sliver of the public, not the broader public interest. Those days, it seems, may be coming to an end.”
During the hearing, Carr responded to obtuse Democrats’ refusal to understand the difference between broadcasters and other media with examples of flagrant Democrat attempts to censor channels such as Fox News, OANN and Newsmax in 2021.
For example, Carr responded to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA) by highlighting an egregious set of letters from two of Matsui’s former Democrat colleagues on the subcommittee to the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Comcast, Roku, Verizon and others in Big Tech and media. These letters, which cite chronically unfunny comedian John Oliver as an authoritative source, browbeat carriers for continuing to enable so-called disinformation over the COVID-19 pandemic. Carr also mentioned another flagrant example in his answer to Pfluger:
“You had Democrats in Congress write letters to the FCC asking it to investigate the news activities of Sinclair broadcaster because they disagreed with the views of Sinclair--After that letter, there were 227 routine Sinclair licenses that came up for renewal or were pending during the Biden years, and all but one of those—so 226—were not renewed by the FCC. That was unprecedented. It had never happened before. So Democrats put pressure and it engendered results.”
Carr followed this by explaining, “What we're doing is applying the public interest standard in an evenhanded way. And for people that benefited from the weaponization during the Biden years that may feel like discrimination, but it doesn't make it so."
However, the FCC chair did not have to do all the work of exposing Democrat censorship hypocrisy himself. Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL) contradicted her colleagues’ newfound respect for free speech by bemoaning that President Trump was frustrating platforms' ability to “responsibly moderate content” (censor online speech).
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