Watching ABC submit to Donald Trump over his defamation lawsuit against the network—giving him $15 million for his presidential library and another $1 million in legal fees to settle the case—did not feel great. But there’s more where that came from, and Trump is about to weaponize the government to settle his scores with the media.
Trump still has a lawsuit pending against CBS, alleging that the network committed election interference by deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to make her look better. He judge-shopped that case to the Northern District of Texas, where there’s only one judge, Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, who routinely rules in favor of conservatives.
But Trump may not need to pursue that case very diligently, given that he’s bringing in Brendan Carr as head of the Federal Communications Commission. Carr is a current FCC commissioner, and he’s full MAGA. He’s made clear that he sees his job as going after Trump’s enemies. Given that the FCC controls broadcast licenses, he can keep CBS stations in the crosshairs.
The FCC doesn’t license networks like ABC, CBS, or NBC, but it does have authority over broadcast stations owned by the networks. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counsel for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, explained to Ars Technica that the administration can still use the FCC to “hassle the living daylights out of broadcasters or other media outlets in annoying ways,” single some broadcast stations out, and slow-walk applications or block mergers.
Trump doesn’t seem to understand this and thinks that the networks can just be wiped out. He has called for CBS to lose its license over October’s “60 Minutes” interview, for NBC and CNN to lose their licenses for not airing his victory speech after the Iowa primary in January, and for ABC to lose its license for “unfair” fact-checking during his September debate with Harris.
Though Carr, as a sitting FCC commissioner and former telecommunications lawyer, knows full well that the FCC can’t just yank a network off the air, he nonetheless started complaining about the networks even before getting tapped to run the agency. After Harris appeared on “Saturday Night Live” just before the election, Carr ran to Fox Business to threaten NBC. His logic? That NBC violated the “equal time” rule by not giving Trump the same air time. Sure, except that NBC actually followed the equal time rule and gave Trump free airtime that weekend during a NASCAR race and “Sunday Night Football.” Somehow, according to Carr, this still warranted FCC investigation, with consequences that could include revoking NBC’s broadcast licenses.
Now that Carr has been offered the top job, he’s already said that he’d not only consider Trump’s laughable complaint against CBS. He might use it as the basis to block a merger between Skydance and Paramount, which involves the transfer of CBS-owned local stations. Carr told Fox News that he was “pretty confident” that Trump’s complaint about “60 Minutes” “is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC’s review of that transaction.” So essentially if Carr finds the “60 Minutes” interview wanting, he will use it to mess with CBS on an entirely different thing.
Putting Carr atop the FCC doesn’t just allow Trump to attack broadcast networks. Carr has already shown he’s eager to be Trump’s all-purpose attack dog. Just a few days after the 2024 election, Carr wrote to the heads of Alphabet (aka Google), Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, saying those companies played a significant role in “an unprecedented surge in censorship” by doing things like fact-checking. His threat to Big Tech was not at all subtle, saying that he was confident that once Trump and the new Congress take office, they will take action to restore First Amendment rights—and that such action could include a review of company activities and third-party organizations that Carr also thinks have violated the First Amendment.
Fun fact: The FCC doesn’t actually have jurisdiction over social media platforms or other similar web services. But Carr, who authored the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, is eager to extend the agency’s authority and wants to gut Section 230, which currently provides broad immunity to social networks for material published on their site. Under Carr, the FCC would get to decide whether social media companies are moderating “in good faith.”
All you need to know about Carr’s ideology can be gleaned from the omission of one social media company from his threatening letter: X, the cesspool formerly known as Twitter. Carr loves X. It’s where he goes to post about dismantling the “censorship cartel,” to threaten CBS some more, and to insult the Federal Aviation Association for having the temerity to examine the environmental impact of a proposal by X owner Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Carr is also very eager to give his pal Musk even more taxpayer dollars, complaining that it was “regulatory lawfare against one of the left’s top targets” when the FCC revoked an $885 million grant to Musk’s Starlink when it couldn’t show it would reach enough rural homes.
So this is what the FCC will look like under Carr during the second Trump administration: a weapon to be used against any company Trump doesn’t like, whether the FCC has the authority or not.
As a bonus, it’s also likely that Carr’s FCC will shovel cash toward the world’s richest man, who happens to run a social media company that is hemorrhaging users because people don’t want to hang out with white nationalists and Nazis.
Indeed, if you want a vision of the future Carr and Trump crave, it pretty much would look like X. Musk, ostensibly a “free speech warrior,” the dumb moniker Trump has applied to Carr as well, has suspended accounts of journalists who displease him and sued companies that reported on the rampant hate speech on the platform.
Musk and Trump have previously had to spend their own money to threaten journalists and suppress speech, but under Carr, the government will do it for them.
