Threatening broadcast licenses is a bad idea
As much as I would like to see biased networks with news divisions pretending to be unbiased get what’s coming to them, the continued threats by the Trump Administration and the Federal Communications Commission are beginning to bother me.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr said in an interview published on Monday that he is willing to pull broadcast licenses from any media company that does not align with the public’s interest.
Carr accused Comcast in April of “misleading the American public” with its coverage of the deportation of alleged MS-13 member Kilmar Abrego Garcia and said the FCC would investigate whether Comcast’s programming decisions “best reflect the needs and interests of their communities.” He warned in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he is willing to revoke the license of any media company if necessary.
“Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows,” Carr told The WSJ.
To be clear, many of us understand that religiously partisan media slant on issues like COVID and George Floyd has resulted in significant immediate and long-term harm, including death, nothing at all in the public interest, and remarkably, almost unexplicably, the precise opposite. The traditional ‘mainstream’ media misleads, lies by omission, and then gets offended when you bring receipts. And when they are caught red-handed, thanks in large part to the efforts of folks like James O’Keefe, they dismiss, distract, redirect, and get back to business as usual.
Seven to nine-figure lawsuit settlements are gratifying to see when justified, but the networks keep lying or lying by omission. There is little to no effort at balance or objectivity. But that’s no reason to threaten to yank their broadcast license. And doing so makes you look a lot like the Administration that used force to censor the unlicensed internet media and everyone on it.
I’m not saying they should be free to break the law or not get taken to the woodshed for misbehavior. Citizens affect change by bringing their subscriptions and eyeballs to different channels or domains. Private individuals can sue them for libel or slander or whatever defamation might appear to have exceeded the right to report.
The Department of Labor can investigate violations of applicable laws and file suit accordingly, as can any other agency with authority and evidence of laws broken. At no point, however, should it become a vendetta in search of media revenge porn. Obama’s DOJ and IRS were cudgels that engaged in raids and intimidation against private businesses. It also coordinated with third parties to whom it gave protected donor lists so activists could terrorize those who gave to organizations they didn’t like.
The Biden Administration got exposed for doing the same sort of work with social media and internet companies by pointing out how they operated at their pleasure. Trump’s FCC, in my mind, is looking a lot like that, and if what Obama and Biden did was fascist, so is this.
The Fairness Doctrine was never fair. According to the Daily Caller, citing the WSJ, “The FCC has only revoked the broadcast license of a media company once in 1971 after a station in Jackson, Mississippi, defended segregation.”
Segregation was awful, and the Left’s modern, woke, identity politics push to normalize it by convincing people to self-segregate is, too. Still, it is not grounds for censorship of any sort.
Carr has justified his hands-on approach by citing a 1934 law which states that “because a given broadcast network is granted airwaves to use exclusively as its own, it needs to operate in ‘public interest, convenience and necessity,” according to The WSJ. He stated that the FCC is “fully aligned with the agenda” that President Donald Trump “is running and plans to restore trust between the public and the media.”
And while this appears to be the legal “out” for heavy-handedness, their slanted coverage of George Floyd and COVID alone proves they are not operating in the public interest, I’d be inclined to come at them another way.
Threatening to silence them plays into the Left’s unhinged rants about Kings and Tyrants and contradicts other efforts to ensure free speech is protected.
If it’s the DEI thing and DEI is affecting hiring, roll the Department of Labor and the DOJ’s Civil Rights divisions into their parking lots and offices. Give their roomful of corporate lawyers something to do with the massive retainers they get. Do anything and everything within the confines of the law, but don’t take their broadcast license.
