FCC Boss Brendan Carr Wants You To Know He’s Having A Great Time Trampling Free Speech, Attacking Civil Rights, And Destroying All Broadband Consumer Protection

Broadband

from the journalistic-simulacrum dept

We’ve noted repeatedly how new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is a Trump bootlicker of the highest order. He’s also busy illegally leveraging FCC power to trample the First Amendment and bully media companies that aren’t kissing Trump’s ass. At least when he isn’t busy attacking FCC civil rights reforms or dismantling whatever’s left of the agency’s consumer protection efforts.

If you could sit Brendan down for a real interview there are a lot of questions you could ask him about his blistering hypocrisy across a wide variety of subjects (remember he was a guy that thought some basic net neutrality rules were extremist agency overreach, yet now has no problem leveraging nonexistent FCC authority to bully companies he doesn’t even regulate into bowing down to Donald Trump).

Unfortunately Brendan is afraid of real reporters. So he recently sat down with former telecom industry policy guy Ted Hearn for one of the most feckless softball interviews I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading. The entire article at Broadband Breakfast is just filled with misleading and leading questions and answers, and at no point does Hearn seriously press Carr on his radical and unpopular policies.

In it, Carr crows that he’s having a wonderful time dismantling civil rights, consumer protection, and journalistic free speech:

“We are roughly four weeks into this. We’re having an absolute blast, really enjoying it… Since the election, I’ve been down to Palm Beach/Mar-a-Lago probably four or five times and the president’s always in a great mood. I think if you step back and just look at the country in general, it really feels like this wet blanket has been lifted and there’s just so much optimism right now. I really do feel like we’re entering this golden age for the country.“

Real finger on the pulse stuff here. This idea that Carr is really having fun being a zealot appears to be important to Carr, who has leaked similar comments to several other outlets during the first month of his extremism-packed tenure. He can’t hear your complaints about his radical anti-consumer, anti-First Amendment, revolving-door regulator hypocrisy because he’s having too much fun.

This is where a competent reporter might press Carr on the brow beating Republican officials are enjoying at their townhalls thanks to Musk’s incoherent assault on federal workers. Or the fact that a bipartisan collection of three former commissioners think Carr’s assault on the First Amendment is extreme, radical, logically incoherent, and dangerous to both real journalism and free speech.

Instead Hearn just stumbles forward downplaying Carr’s extremism, peppering the Trump ally with softball questions like this:

“Broadband Breakfast: The people who want you to revoke the TV license of Fox 29 in Philadelphia are some of the same people who say you’re a threat to the First Amendment. What’s wrong with that picture?”

So for one, any respected First Amendment expert of note think Carr is a threat to the First Amendment, so Hearn is being misleading. Two, the Fox 29 license complaint was filed by a single media activism group angry that Fox lied repeatedly to its viewers about election fraud. It never went anywhere because the last FCC didn’t want to yank Fox 29’s license, out of concern it would set a bad precedent for guys like Carr, who proceeded to use it to justify First Amendment violating behavior anyway.

The interview is full of leading questions that frame major issues in a way that’s favorable to corporate power, such as calling some modest, loophole-filled, and hugely popular net neutrality rules (killed by the telecom-allied Trump courts last month) “heavy handed”:

“Broadband Breakfast: It’s clear that the Sixth Circuit has vindicated your strong opposition to the heavy-handed Title II Net Neutrality regime embraced by the Biden administration. What are the next steps legally for the FCC and perhaps DOJ?”

It’s almost an afterthought throughout the interview that the Trump administration and Supreme Court are taking an absolute hatchet to the U.S. government’s already fairly feckless consumer protection apparatus. That this will result in higher bills, worse service, and greater monopolized consolidation simply isn’t of interest to Hearn, who, again, has roots as a telecom industry policy and lobbying.

To be fair to Hearn, most of the U.S. press couldn’t care less about the consumer protection angle of Carr’s tenure either. The fact the FCC will no longer have the authority to regulate the worst behaviors of consolidated regional telecom monopolies (and what that means in the real world for real people) barely gets any coverage, especially amidst the justified din of outrage at Carr’s other abuses.

Such as Carr’s dismantling of popular FCC civil rights reforms. Prompted by Congress, the FCC for the first time in 2023 formally acknowledged that racial discrimination has long existed in broadband deployment and took some fairly weak steps to address the problem. I wrote a feature about this for The Verge. Carr is destroying those efforts in not coincidental lockstep with a telecom industry lawsuit.

This is ignorant, bigoted, virulently unpopular, and driven by industry greed, but in the interview Carr is allowed to hide behind the bogeyman that is “DEI,” a term hijacked by authoritarian propagandists to conflate popular civil rights reforms with half-assed corporate inclusivity initiatives. The goal is to normalize racism and frame the elimination of civil rights reforms as efficiency, as Carr does here:

“On basically the first day that I became Chairman, I announced, following President Trump’s leadership on this issue in an executive order, that we were ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI. People would be shocked if they learned how much promoting DEI had been embedded into the work of the FCC. We were spending millions and millions of dollars, the FCC promoting DEI.”

Hearn doesn’t press Carr on the fact that equity is literally written into the Communications Act. Or that Congress in 2021 demanded the FCC tackle digital discrimination as part of the infrastructure bill. We’re about to spend $42.5 billion in taxpayer money on new broadband subsidies, and planners (correctly) thought it made very good sense to map broadband accurately to make sure it was deployed evenly, to everyone.

As authoritarians strip the country for parts and sell it for scrap off the back loading dock, it’s more important than ever to press these guys on what they’re actually doing and what they actually mean. Letting them hide behind misleading rhetoric, or pretend that their policies aren’t both radical and radically unpopular, only acts to enable them and normalize authoritarianism.

There’s a reason Carr won’t give interviews to hard-nosed, real reporters, and there’s a reason he’s trying to bully major media companies into feckless compliance (with mixed results so far): He doesn’t want people being honest about what he’s actually doing. Because what he’s doing isn’t popular, isn’t helpful, is radically dangerous, and primarily serves the interests of affluent invertebrates.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, civil rights, consumer protection, discrimination, extremism, fcc, first amendment, media, regulators