Morning Wire - Federal Communication Course Correction | 2.16.25

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

Brendan Carr, the new chairman of the FCC, discusses the actions he’s taking to align the agency with Trump’s agenda. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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enlarge our clientele to the world entire. Trouve of little enterprises like on our own.com. President Trump has been engaged in legal battles with legacy media outlets over claims of news

distortion and partisan bias. The Federal Communications Commission under its new chairman Brendan Carr is aggressively moving to enact Trump's priorities. among those promoting free speech and transparency, cracking down on censorship, and modernizing the communications landscape. In this episode, we sit down with the chairman to discuss the flurry of actions his agency is taking to carry out Trump's agenda. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

It's Sunday, February 16th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the aggressive plans for the FCC under Trump is its new chairman, Brendan Carr. Chairman, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, great to be with you. Thanks so much. Now, it's been a whirlwind for you guys. I know the FCC has involved in a lot, and you're heading up a lot of initiatives in the upcoming weeks and months. And I wanted to ask you about many of them. So there's a lot of questions coming. First, during the presidential campaign, 60 Minutes famously aired an edited version of

its interview with presidential candidate VP Kamala Harris. Now they've turned over the full transcript and the unedited tapes. What does the FCC's review of that interview? shown so far? Well, the FCC's review is ongoing to step back. There was a complaint filed at the FCC regarding CBS 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Harris under something called the news distortion rule. This is a rule that goes back 50 years at the FCC. The reality is it's sort of a one in the million case if you can make out a news distortion complaint because after all, we don't want the FCC to be authenticating news or to be superintending editorial decisions. What happened at the end of the Biden administration, however, was that the Democrat-led FCC summarily dismissed the complaint without actually obtaining any evidence that would be relevant to making that decision.

Now, again, usually you don't get out of the starting blocks with these, but there was extrinsic evidence here where CBS played one version of a response or a portion of a response in one broadcast, and then a separate portion or separate answer in another portion. And so that created the extrinsic evidence that would allow the FCC to need to obtain the underlying transcript or video, which we've done. And now we've determined that it's in the public interest to let the American people express their own views. People feel passionately about this. They feel like CBS did something wrong. Other people feel like CBS did normal editing. And everybody now has an opportunity to make their voices heard the FCC. And in terms of where our process is, we're just taking input at this point.

We haven't reached a final decision on the merits, but we will eventually when the record is complete. And what have you heard from the public so far? What's the public response been like? Yeah, there's been some interesting reactions. I think you have everyone from Catherine Harwich, who is a, you know, well-known reporter and really diligent on these issues. I think her view that she's expressed on X is that to her, this looked like it went beyond normal editing. We've heard from other people that say this is just normally shortening up an answer, run-of-the-mill things. But look, I think there's a lot of lack of trust right now in media, and that's part of why I wanted to open this proceeding was so that nobody feels like there's a decision that's being made behind closed doors or something's been swept under the rug. And again, stepping back, you know, trust in media right now is at an absolute all-time low.

And that's not just not my opinion alone. Look at Jeff Bezos. He had that op-ed out there where he said that the news industry has fallen from actually one of the most trusted institutions many years ago to now being less trusted than even confidence. Congress itself, which is not good. You're sort of in the basement at that point. And at least with respect to broadcast media, that's where the entities have a public interest obligation because they're licensed by the FCC. And for decades, the FCC basically walked away from that and didn't put any sort of requirement at all. I think one thing that hopefully people have seen over the first few weeks of the Trump administration and here at the FCC is that we're going to reinvigorate that.

Now, Trump has settled several lawsuits against media companies, ABC and META, for example. Many on the left are warning that Trump is bullying media outlets in essentially forcing journalists to tone down their coverage of his administration through these actions. How do you see it? I think we're seeing an even-handed application of the law. There's a quote from Thomas Sol that I'll change a little bit. But whenever people have benefited from discriminatory government practices, even-handed treatment than itself. It feels like discrimination to them. So step back. At the FCC, for instance,

we had this deal with Elon Musk where we were going to find high-speed internet to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans for pennies on the dollar. And that was abruptly revoked by the FCC. And what I said at the time was plainly for political retribution against Elon Musk. Or flash forward to the other side of the coin where George Soros aligned group sought to get special streamlined expedited treatment from the FCC to obtain 200 radio stations, and the FCC created a special unprecedented Soros shortcut. And so when you move into a world in which every regulated entity is now getting fair and equal treatment, people say, well, isn't this discrimination? But again, I think people have to level set as to where we've been over the last couple of years. And to be

clear, there's plenty of people that are, you know, wailing and gnashing teeth about the conduct and the investigations that I'm launching at the FCC. This past week, I also announced an investigation into ComGAS and NBC for their DEI practices. But these are the same people that were, you know, completely silent when the FCC was engaging in those things. My view is everyone gets a fair shake at the FCC now. And, you know, we're just going to call balls and strikes. And if people don't like it, you know, it is what it is. But in my view, it would be sort of the definition of corruption if I, you know, cared what people thought in terms of, well, you're going too hard on this broadcaster or that broadcaster, you're being too nice to

this person. So shouldn't you pull punches? Like, no, that's like the definition of corruption. So if you think that I'm going too hard in one direction, I don't care. You know, we're just going to do what's in front of us and make the best decisions that we can. I wanted to ask you about that Comcast investigation. What exactly are you looking at and where does that stand now? Yeah, so President Trump came in and is sort of leading the country away from this really dark period, this scourge of what I do is illegal DEI discrimination. He did two executive orders right off the back. one that ends DEI with respect to the federal government itself. And we've followed that policy at the FCC. We've now ended the FCC's own promotion of DEI. And I got to tell you, people would be shocked if they knew how much both money and time and resources their federal government was spending on DEI.

The FCC alone, which is roughly a $350, $400 million a year agency, we were spending millions of dollars promoting DEI. It was in our budget. We had it listed as our number two strategic priority, and we were just way off course in terms of court missions. Second, President Trump issued an executive order that asked the heads of agencies to look at the private sector businesses that we regulate and see if they're engaging in illegal DEI. because after all, DEI has long been illegal in this country, in my view, because it's in violation of civil rights laws. At least some versions of DEI, you can have various forms of DEI policies to be sure. And so what I've done with Comcast as I've started there, I sent a letter to Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, asking questions about both Comcast and NBC, which is part of this whole same suite of companies, and letting them know that we've started an investigation at the Enforcement Bureau. because they still very publicly on their website have a lot of substantial information they are about DEI programs that they're promoting. We've also started with Comcast because they're in many, many

different sectors that we regulate. They're a cable provider. They provide internet. They own broadcast TV stations. And they're, we call it MV&O wireless provider. You can get wireless service through them as well. But the key is that's just the beginning. My expectation is that every single entity that the FCC regulates, if they have any, they're going to end any of these illegal discriminatory DEI policies. I'm hoping that by starting with Comcast, everybody gets the message. Again, we want equality. We want fairness. We want everyone in this country have a fair shot. We want merit to rise to the top. And maybe there's things that people are doing under the term DEI that are totally appropriate. But that's exactly what we're going to get to the bottom of here.

And you can't pick a more ubiquitous company for sure. Let's turn to NPR and public funding. Can you explain why you've launched an investigation into NPR for their commercials? Yeah, this one's really interesting. So there's been a lot of attention on NPR and PBS recently for a couple reasons. One, there was sort of a former employee at one of these companies that spoke out about a lot of the editorial decisions that they had been making. And if you step back, NPR, PBS, are taxpayer funded. That means that every single American is forced to subsidize the materials that come out of there. And if you look back historically, they broadly appeal to a pretty good representative cross-section of the country. And Uri Berliner had a piece out where he described that they've increasingly become focused on just sort of appealing to a very niche audience portion of the country.

And I think it's right for people to ask questions about should every single American be forced to subsidize that when it's seemingly only being directed at a very narrow portion. But sort of put that to the side for a second. That's one issue. The second issue is the debate in Congress about should Congress continue to fund NPR and PBS. My own view is I don't see a reason why we should do that, given the breadth and depth and diversity of viewpoints and outlets that now exists as compared to the 1960s when Congress first went down this path. But for the FCC, there's a unique issue. All these stations, the individual stations that air this programming, they're licensed by the FCC as non-commercial stations, meaning they can't air commercials. And yet, it may entirely be the case that NPR and PBS are airing things that cross the line from permissible sponsorship identification and underwriting into things that look and feel an awful lot like commercials. And again, maybe this is an area where

the FCC step back on enforcement over the years. But I think we should lean in, and that's what we're going to do, because A, we want to make sure they're living up to their licensed obligations. But B, if they're able to go out there and raise commercial funds to support their programming, then why are we taking taxpayer dollars to support what is effectively a commercial operation? So that investigation is underway as well. We are obtaining and taking a look at the various commercials slash underwriting materials that they're putting out there, and we're going to run a normal investigation at that point. So several investigations here. And this brings me to my final question. Do you see the FCC as having a more active or less active role in monitoring media

companies under Trump? Look, it's one of my top priorities is reinvigorating this public interest standard. And I think, again, when you start from the point that trust in media is at an all-time low, I think the FCC not doing that has certainly not aided in that effort. But it's only a small component of the agenda that I'm going to be running at the FCC. It's one that we've taken early action on. It's one that deals with media, so media covers it. But really, we're running a four-part play at the FCC. One is restoring free speech. This has been long, been a priority of mine. We're going to be working to break up this censorship cartel. There's many actions that we are taking and that we're going to be taking more publicly to help restore free speech and rein in big tech.

Number two is a lot of this modernizing the FCC's approach to media regulation. That's where we've seen a lot of early action, a lot of early coverage. But three, there's an entire bucket of economic agenda that we're also running. So the space economy, the FCC plays a role there. And frankly, we've just been moving way too slow over the years. We need to move at the pace and cadence of all these launches that we're seeing across the country. So we are reforming our efforts on the space front. Permitting reform, we have a role there. It takes too long to build in this country. We're going to be doing stuff on that front. Spectrum, these are the airwaves that power all these innovations. The Biden administration effectively flatlines.

when it came to spectrum, we're going to be getting more spectrum into the marketplace. And then four is national security and public safety. Salt Typhoon is an effort what we're plugging in. Obviously, there's a lot of work to do on that front. So we're going to be running this four-part agenda at the FCC. But yeah, we've taken some early action on media. It's got a lot of attention. But we've got four years and we're going to deliver really good results across all of those different metrics. Now, I said that was my last question, but you brought up the censorship cartel that's been put in place through these various companies, big tech companies. The Daily Wire is particularly interested in this, obviously. Have you guys looked at the trend of jawboning and the government using fact checkers and

news site ratings in coordination with big tech companies to censor people? Are you looking specifically at that? Yeah, of course. When I described the censorship cartel, it cuts across four, five, or six different verticals. So one is you've got decisions that these platforms were making basically on their own to censor the free speech rights of Americans. I didn't think that was a good thing. It sounds like a lot of them following X's lead and returning back to free speech. You see Zuckerberg saying a lot of good things there. We're going to trust,

but verify when it comes to him. Two, you saw the jawbone. You had the federal government reaching out sometimes, you know, formally through email, sometimes informally through the phone, suggesting specific posts that should be taken down. I think that's a violation of the First Amendment. And so that is ending as well. And then you have this advertising and marketing cartel. that works together. Newsgar is part and partial that. I've written a letter to entities that use NewsGuard. NewsGar wrote me the letter back. Now, in the volley that we have going on here, NewsGuard will be hearing from me again. I don't see how websites that, for instance, have Section 230 protections. You only get 230 protections if you engage in good faith content moderation. When you look at what

we know about NewsGuard and how much a bad actor they are and part of the censorship cartel, I don't see how any company, Google or otherwise, can continue to rely on NewsGuard and be considered to be acting in good faith as the law requires. And then there's Europe as well. Europe and Brazil globally, a lot of these government regulators are attempting to use different metrics to engage in censorship. Vice President Vance gave a barn burner fantastic speech on AI this past week, and he touched on some of that where you can't regulate American AI in a way that's going to shut down, robust, wide open political debate and political discourse. So the censorship cartel hits on all of these different verticals, and we need to sort of take action on them. But NewsGuard is a piece of it. The advertising and marketing piece of it is, taking conservative websites, conservative channels, and not allowing

advertisers to advertise there. I think that's the type of discrimination that we're going to be working to end on. It won't just be us at the FCC. You know, the Federal Trade Commission, Chairman Ferguson, has said this is a priority of his. I anticipate that the FCC and the FTC will ultimately lock arms and move forward together to make sure that we fully and completely dismantle this censorship cartel. Well, music to many people's ears in the news world for sure. Thank you so much for talking with us. All right. Thanks. I appreciate it.

That was FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.