Trump wants media to bend the knee. His new FCC chairman is leading the charge | Opinion
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr appears ready and willing to do MAGA's bidding against news outlets.
President Donald Trump's constant warfare with the news media serves him two ways. He immediately satisfies his unquenchable thirst for attention and, over time, he can strong-arm his critics into supplication.
Brendan Carr, a longtime Federal Communications Commission staffer and commissioner whom Trump in November appointed to chair the agency, is one of his top generals in this particular battle.
That's why I tuned in Thursday when Carr spoke at a summit hosted in Washington, D.C., by the news website Semafor on restoring trust in news.
Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012, is a prime example of the kind of MAGA transformation we so often see now, where previously old-school Republicans who favor deregulation suddenly see federal agencies as tools to target Trump's perceived enemies.
The biggest news Carr made in his interview, to me, was his claim to be uninformed about an unhinged social media rant that Trump uncorked Sunday against Comcast and its cable news channel MSNBC. It was Trump's typical "fake news" tantrum, name-dropping MSNBC show hosts who criticize him.
"This whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party," Trump wrote. "They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country."
Comcast's NBCUniversal also operates dozens of local television stations around the country under licenses regulated by the FCC. Are we really supposed to believe that Carr, four days after that post, was still ignorant about Trump's thinking here?
Brendan Carr is using the FCC to do what MAGA does
I spent some time in Washington last weekend, listening to Trump fans as well as his critics. A phrase I kept hearing when people described Trump's behavior is that it can be "shocking, but not surprising."
So I'm not surprised that Carr used Trumpian tactics here ‒ play dumb when it suits a purpose. He kept talking about the FCC following the law and making sure television and radio broadcasters serve the public interest.
That's not what Carr has been using the FCC for of late. Just two weeks ago, he sicced FCC regulators on Comcast and NBCUniversal, demanding an investigation because the company dared to state on its website that "diversity, equity and inclusion are a core value of our business."
DEI, as it is known, is one of Trump's favorite boogeymen. He uses it to suggest that treating all people the same is somehow unfair to white guys like him. Carr is clearly on board with that sort of deceitful demagoguery.
Another favorite MAGA tactic is projection ‒ accuse critics of the kinds of behaviors that they are criticizing. Three former FCC chairs took issue last week with Carr targeting broadcasters who have upset Trump. So Carr accused them all of showing partisan bias.
Trump and Carr push a media double standard
Trump is suing CBS News on the complaint that the network's "60 Minutes" show edited an aired interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election.
During a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he was asking for "a lot" of money to settle the lawsuit. But then he played dumb when asked if his lawsuit was linked to the FCC review of Skydance Media's pending acquisition of CBS' parent company, Paramount.
"I don’t think it’s linked, but probably the lawyers look at it, you know, because I know it’s going along," Trump said just before praising Carr as "a very competent person."
Let's review: Trump, who appeared in a heavily edited Fox News interview in October, called for CBS News to lose its broadcast license for editing an interview with Harris that same month.
Carr picked up Trump's banner in that fight. And Paramount might just pay up in Trump's lawsuit to let a larger business deal go through.
Should media fight Trump's attempt to control news coverage?
Semafor's summit included interviews with Bret Baier, the chief political anchor at Fox News, and his former colleague Megyn Kelly, who now has a show airing on SiriusXM and YouTube. That provided a striking contrast between caution and capitulation when it comes to Trump.
Baier, who has interviewed Trump and provoked his wrath, warned about the unforeseen implications of precedents being set now in Trump's constant conflict with the media, including banning The Associated Press from some White House events and taking over administration of the pool from the White House Correspondents' Association.
"If you do something here," Baier said, "it lasts for a long time, no matter (if it is a) Democratic or Republican administration."
Kelly, who drew Trump's continuing ire in 2016 for asking him during a Republican presidential debate about his controversial comments about women, said a year later he was the reason she left Fox News.
Kelly in November appeared on stage with Trump at a campaign rally to endorse him.
At the Semafor summit, she knocked Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos as "weak" for "bending the knee" to Trump. Axios on Thursday detailed how Bezos, who founded Amazon, started courting Trump last summer.
Here, Kelly is spot-on correct about Bezos while also is willfully deaf to her own hypocrisy about bending the knee: "You win respect with Trump when you go to him and you tell him I like you."
That might be the ticket to Trump's affections. But it's not the job of journalists, no matter how hard Carr works the levers of the FCC to generate that sort of submission.
Follow Paste BN columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan