FCC Chair wielding equal-time rule in service of Trump’s agenda
“These are MAGA airwaves now,” seems clear enough that no one has to doubt FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s intent to keep an already reeling media landscape deep in the yellow.
During a Thursday interview on the Charlie Kirk Show, co-host Andrew Kolvet asked Carr why CBS had prevented Colbert from airing the Talarico interview.
“Well, look, as soon as I found out that Talarico going to be on, I went down to the bowels of the FCC, the Media Bureau, I found the dump button, I pushed it, and I said, these are MAGA airwaves now,” Carr joked.
The FCC chair later revealed that CBS lawyers had prevented the interview from airing because Carr had previously threatened to change FCC rules that traditionally exempted talk shows from equal-time restrictions.
Joking that he hit the dump button on an interview, and claiming direct control over what we see and hear on television, Carr is laughing while the country sinks deeper into danger. Carr is perfectly happy to use whatever tools he can find to bend the narrative in Trump’s favor.
“Do you think there’s a case to be made [that] this is sort of an obsolete standard that it infringes a little bit on freedom of speech, and there’s so many ways to get your message out there now?” Neff asked.
“There’s a lot of reasonable people that say there’s such a diversity of mechanisms to get your perspectives out there that we don’t need those types of regulations,” Carr agreed. “If people want to do that then they can go to Congress and they can change the law but you know my job at this point is to enforce in a fair and balanced way the laws passed by Congress and that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
RawStory
These are sad and desperate times.
Funny how his idea of presenting differing viewpoints in a “fair and balanced way” is coercing the media into only presenting the view he agrees with.
Malfeasance, misfeasance, but alas not nonfeasance.