Forcing the Media to Lie

The FCC’s threats to the media can’t be ignored

[Photo credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images]

Brendan Carr, the corrupt, sycophantic chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now threatening to revoke broadcast licenses after Donald criticized media coverage of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, the war of choice he launched without seeking the permission of Congress or the American people.

What was Donald’s issue with the coverage? It’s accurate, so Carr is suggesting that television and radio stations could lose their licenses if they do not change their reporting to be more favorable to Donald--which is to say he is going to punish television and radio stations unless they start to lie. In an interview with increasingly Trump-regime-friendly CBS News, Carr claimed that broadcast licenses are not guaranteed rights and warned that stations could lose them if they failed to serve the public interest by, in his words, “telling the truth.”

In other words, Carr wants reporters and news organizations to lie to the American people about the very serious topic of war all in service to make Donald look good and his decisions seem rational.

Committing journalism, the very thing broadcasters are licensed to do, is being treated by the FCC as a potential violation if the reporting continues to displease Donald. Carr went even further, accusing some broadcasters of spreading “fake news,” which, as we all know, is Donald’s slight whenever factual reporting reflects badly on him.

Over the weekend, Carr posted a message on Twitter that made his intentions very clear:

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all-time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.

The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.

It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.

When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of [sic] hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.

Time for change!

The FCC regulates the public airwaves; oversees radio, television, and satellite communications; and issues licenses to individual broadcast stations, not entire networks. That creates some limits on how much damage someone in Carr’s position can do.

Still, we need to pay attention when the Chair of the FCC is amplifying the propaganda being churned out by his boss. And his threats matter because they’re clearly meant to have a chilling effect on the media’s ability to report the news honestly and accurately. When the federal government openly suggests that stations could lose their licenses for reporting news it does not like, that crosses a red line.

In response to Carr’s post, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pointed out that it’s illegal for the government to censor speech simply because it dislikes the media’s coverage of Donald’s war with Iran. She wrote:

The First Amendment does not allow the government to punish journalists for doing their jobs.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) went further:

This is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We are not on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. We are in the middle of it.

Act like it.

Senator Murphy is exactly right. This is not a hypothetical danger. We are not standing at the edge of authoritarianism wondering if it might arrive one day. We are in the middle of it.

The attempt to intimidate journalists, put pressure on media institutions, and weaponize regulatory agencies against critics are classic tactics used by authoritarian regimes, of which the Trump regime is one.

Donald launches the attacks, crafts the disinformation, and spreads the propaganda and then his underlings do his bidding. His political allies and loyalists are in positions of power throughout the federal government. Brendan Carr did not appoint himself. Donald nominated him to be a commissioner of the FCC in 2017 and Pres. Joe Biden nominated him again in 2023. He’s been confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate three times. So, there’s a lot of blame to go around. It’s Donald, however, who made Carr Chair of the FCC in January of 2025 after Carr proved his MAGA bona fides after writing the FCC chapter of the fascist manifesto, Project 2025.

This moment has exposed the weaknesses of institutions like the FCC that, during the Trump regime, are increasingly acting in contravention to their stated missions and no longer push back against the encroachments of an out-of-control executive. Corporate media companies have bent the knee repeatedly, often out of fear of retaliation or a desire to avoid conflict. White-shoe law firms have too often chosen capitulation over resistance. Many institutions of higher learning have also given in at the first opportunity.

Each of these decisions may seem small in isolation. Each may have been justified as pragmatic or even necessary. But when powerful institutions decide it is safer to cooperate with a corrupt fascist regime than to resist, they make it easier for authoritarian actors to consolidate power and endanger the rest of us.

The federal government possesses enormous regulatory authority and controls investigative agencies and enforcement mechanisms that can be used to create immense pressure on individuals and organizations. When that power is used responsibly, it serves the public good. When it is wielded to intimidate critics and silence the press, it becomes a tool for dismantling the very democracy it was designed to protect.

The less transparency there is from the White House, the greater the information vacuum. And that brings me to something that surfaced this weekend that illustrates the perils of the moment we’re living through. Ali Larijani, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, posted the following just days before being killed by the Israelis:

I’ve heard that the remaining members of Epstein’s network have devised a conspiracy to create an incident similar to 9/11 and blame Iran for it. Iran fundamentally opposes such terrorist schemes and has no war with the American people.

Should we trust anyone in the Iranian government? No, of course not. But does the scheme Larjani lays out sound like something the Trump regime might plausibly try given its track record?

This is what happens when people cannot trust their own government. And as it becomes harder for journalists to report the news without fear or favor, an information vacuum is created that gets filled by rumor, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, which then multiply and gain traction.

When the head of the FCC threatens broadcasters for covering a war honestly, that is not a routine matter of political or policy differences; it’s a warning to us that the Trump regime is willing to test how far it can go to weaken the Fourth Estate. When those in power try to silence journalists, it is never to strengthen democracy. The goal, rather, is to create conditions in which they can operate without scrutiny and with impunity. The moment we begin treating these threats as politics as usual, is the moment the foundations of a democratic society begin to crack. Once those cracks begin to widen, repairing them becomes exponentially more difficult.

Democratic institutions do not defend themselves. That requires people inside of the government, in the media, and across civil society to recognize what is happening and refuse to normalize it. Moments like this reveal whether our institutions are still capable of defending democracy, or if we are fast approaching the point at which we are about to lose something essential if we refuse to do something about it.