Brendan Carr admits his FCC is Trump’s journalism police | Seth Stern and Clayton Weimers

The Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, admitted at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that there had been a political “sea change” and he no longer viewed the FCC as an independent agency. Commissioners, he says, serve at the pleasure of the president.

In his case, that president is Donald Trump, whose face Carr wears as a lapel pin, whose agenda he loudly embraces, and who often publicly demands that Carr censor his critics, including revoking their broadcast licenses.

Soon after Carr’s about-face, the agency quietly scrubbed references to its independence from its website.

Perhaps Carr believes in the unitary executive theory, under which agency heads essentially function like cabinet members. That’s fine. We’re not here to argue with him about administrative law. But he can’t have it both ways. You’re either an umpire calling balls and strikes or a political hack – you can’t be both.

If Carr believes the FCC is subservient to the president, then he is the last person who should be claiming the power to regulate journalists’ editorial decisions under the FCC’s “public interest” standard. By his own admission, he has every incentive to define the “public interest” in whatever manner pleases his boss.

The evidence bears this out. Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.

The Republican senator and Trump ally Ted Cruz sees the problem. At the hearing, the Senate commerce chair called for the repeal of the public interest standard and its “wretched offspring” like the news distortion rule. It’s not because he’s a Kimmel fan, but because he recognizes that if the FCC successfully weaponizes these rules as amorphous censorship powers, there is no turning back, no matter who is in office.

It’s easy to see why. Despite appointing himself the journalism police, qualified to override the judgments of professional journalists and editors, Carr avoids ever articulating his vision of public-interest news, forcing anyone seeking to avoid his ire to play Whac-A-Mole. He’ll tell us what’s not in the public interest, according to the secret rules of journalism that reside in his head, but never what is. He (and only he) knows it when he sees it.

For example, we know from his investigation of radio station KCBS’s reporting on ICE raids in the Bay Area that he thinks reporting the models and general whereabouts of ICE vehicles is outside the public interest. But we don’t know how he believes journalists can report on ICE in a manner that doesn’t violate his arbitrary edicts. Maybe he thinks reporting on ICE is outside the public interest altogether. The only discernible rule of Carr’s FCC is “don’t piss off Trump”. The rest, by design, is guesswork for FCC licensees.

The Associated Press reported last week that, after Carr’s inquiry, KCBS demoted the anchor who read the report on air, and scaled back political coverage for months, with reporters discouraged from pursuing controversial topics that might draw attention from the administration. The veteran political reporter Doug Sovern said he was sidelined after Carr’s investigation was announced. “‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” he said.

Station employees were reportedly summoned to meetings with lawyers who scrutinized their social media posts and questioned them about political bias. The station’s news director reportedly told staff that business considerations required avoiding angering the FCC. This is exactly the outcome Carr and the man on his lapel pin want: newsrooms so terrified of retaliation that they pre-emptively silence themselves. Because of the inconvenience of the first amendment, that’s far easier than getting a court to do their bidding.

There’s an even more disturbing takeaway from the KCBS episode – it’s the logical extension of Carr’s argument that the FCC is not an independent agency, but an instrument of the president’s political agenda. In this case, that instrument was wielded in support of an ongoing immigration crackdown, far outside the FCC’s purview, but central to Maga politics. Where is the line? Carr seems to think there isn’t one.

Carr’s declaration of dependence also should renew focus on his role in Paramount’s $16m settlement of Trump’s frivolous lawsuit over the Harris interview. At the time, the media conglomerate had a multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance Media pending before the FCC.

Upon taking office, Carr reopened a bogus “news distortion” investigation into CBS’s editing of the interview, based on the same allegations as Trump’s court case (he’s investigated nearly every FCC licensee Trump has sued, from Disney to the BBC). It was widely reported that Paramount higher-ups believed that settling with Trump was a prerequisite to the FCC approving the merger. They were even concerned about bribery investigations, and hired legal counsel to minimize directors’ liability risk for settling.

Carr did little to disavow Paramount executives’ belief that he was facilitating bribery. To the contrary, just days after Trump announced he had received Paramount’s check, Carr approved the merger. Does Carr expect us to believe that, while his agency’s not independent from Trump, his merger approval was independent from Trump’s lawsuit? He could have dispelled the bribery talk by approving the merger before the settlement if there were no other issues holding it up. Trump would lose his leverage to extract the bribe, but the FCC would retain its integrity. Carr showed which of those matters more to a non-independent FCC.

But there have been some positives to come from this whole mess. Carr’s obvious overreach has troubled both sides in Washington, with even the staunchest Republicans – and Trump backers – calling him out, including Senator Rand Paul and the former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. Perhaps Wednesday’s hearing can be a first step towards reaffirming a consensus that should be so obvious, it’s absurd that we even need to reaffirm it: as Senator Cruz put it, “Democrat or Republican, we cannot have the government arbitrating truth or opinion.”

By scrubbing references to independence from the FCC website after admitting the agency answers to Trump, Carr has made explicit what his actions already demonstrated. He could not have made a better argument for the dangers of letting the public interest standard serve as the government’s backdoor into the newsroom.

• Seth Stern is the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation and a first amendment lawyer. Clayton Weimers is the executive director of RSF USA, the North American branch of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).