Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr joins the NewsBusters Podcast to discuss protecting free speech over the airwaves and online, the future of broadcast licenses, and Operation Clean Carts—his push to block fraudulent Chinese hardware from infiltrating U.S. networks. David Bozell asks about the FCC's "public interest" standard for broadcast TV affiliates.
At a time when the latest Gallup poll showed an all-time low in trust in the media -- only 28 percent have at least "a fair amount" of trust, while 70 percent said little or no trust -- is it time for a more energetic FCC to question if all this broadcast bias is in the public interest? Carr told Bozell the poll shows "More Americans have trust in gas station sushi than they do in legacy mainstream media. And it’s a problem of the media’s own making."
CARR: The legacy mainstream media missed some of the most important stories of the last five or ten years. Hunter Biden laptop story, gone. Covid origins, total miss. Whips at the border – remember that story? There were all these stories about emergency rooms in the Midwest being shut down from Ivermectin overdoses. It ended up being complete hoaxes, not true. Covington Catholic [Nicholas Sandmann], you go down the line. Jussie Smollett. Major, major important stories. The reason why this news media should exist, and they’re 180 [degrees] wrong on it. So I think it’s a massive indictment on themselves.
While President Trump has talked about pulling licenses for broadcast TV stations, it's a complicated process with hearings. It hasn't been done in decades -- although Carr pointed out that the Left wanted to start that process for broadcast stations owned by Sinclair, charging that they had a right-wing bias. In 2023, leftists pushed a petition seeking to revoke the broadcast license of the Fox-owned affiliate in Philadelphia over its parent company's "promotion of falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 election." The FCC denied it last year.
Watch the podcast below, or on YouTube or Rumble. The audio is here.
