Brendan Carr Launches Baseless ‘Investigation’ Into PBS, NPR, And BBC To Try And Silence Criticism Of His Weird, Unpopular Boss

Free Speech

from the phony-authoritarian-bullshit dept

Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart.

In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, 2), Carr indicates that his bogus inquiry is focusing on a minor edit made in a year-old documentary broadcast by the BBC about the president’s support of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Carr clearly doesn’t regulate UK media organizations. The PBS and NPR never even aired the documentary in question and had nothing do do with the BBC’s edits. So in his letter, Carr has to jump through a bunch of hoops to make his performative effort sound official and coherent:

Tim Karr, Senior Director of consumer group Free Press, told Techdirt that he spoke to the BBC, who never received the supposed letter Carr leaked to Breitbart. It’s also not posted to the FCC website. And it takes a few minutes of research to find that PBS and NPR, again, never aired the documentary in question (“Panorama,” which never aired in the U.S. and wasn’t even all that critical of Trump).

This is a manufactured scandal. Carr is putting on a cute little show for Trump and right wing media so he can pretend he’s being “tough” on “unfair” “liberal” media outlets. While this is performative grandstanding by a strange, unserious man, it’s still very dangerous for a government official to be abusing FCC authority to try and suppress journalism and free speech.

We’ve covered the BBC fracas recently. The short version: a right wing tabloid created a scandal out of the fact that a year old BBC documentary edited together two parts of Trump’s January 6 speech encouraging violence at the Capitol. While the snippet does reflect Trump’s clear and obvious intent to incite violence at the Capitol, the edit stitched together two parts of the same speech 54 minutes apart.

While the edits may have been in poor judgement, there was no actual distortion of Trump’s intent or of history. And to be clear: this is a bogus scandal U.S. authoritarians (no stranger to propaganda, news distortions, and misleading edits) created to pretend to be mad about. Trump and Carr have openly demonstrated they’re fine with misleading news edits if they help the President.

Still, as we’ve seen with outlets like ABC and CBS, that effort’s been working well so far when it comes to major U.S. media companies, whose affluent, usually Conservative owners are more worried about tax cuts, deregulation, and merger approvals than they are about consistently serving the public interest. It’s far less likely to work on a media organization in another country that isn’t regulated by Brendan Carr.

Trump has claimed he’s going to file a $1-$5 billion lawsuit against the BBC for the edit, despite the fact the edits occurred more than a year ago (outside the limits of UK defamation law).

The BBC hasn’t helped itself by over-reacting to the fake right wing scandal; with numerous high level BBC employees resigning, and the BBC CEO tripping over himself to apologize. Still, they’ve promised to fight Trump’s lawsuit, and have a very good chance of winning it.

Since that lawsuit isn’t likely to go well, Trump had Carr once again abuse FCC authority to launch a fake investigation based on the FCC’s decades-old “news distortion” rule. That rule, created in 1949, was supposed to be used to police major scandals — like a company or politician bribing a news organization to suppress a story important to the public interest.

Carr’s been instead weaponizing the rule to bully media companies that engage in commentary or reporting the President doesn’t like, with mixed success. Carr first leveraged the rule to harass CBS for some innocuous edits made to a 60 Minutes interview last election season. He then pushed his luck even further, abusing the rule in a very unsuccessful effort to censor ABC comedian Jimmy Kimmel.

A bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials just last week wrote a letter to Carr, urging him to eliminate the dated rule and stop abusing FCC power to crush free speech and undermine journalism. Carr, a dutiful MAGA loyalist, unsurprisingly refused, continuing to pretend he’s “serving the public interest”:

Unfortunately when the cowed U.S. corporate media covers these obvious attacks on free speech, they tend to soft sell how monumentally full of shit Carr and Trump are on this subject. Which is, of course, the exact outcome Trump and Carr are looking for.

The U.S. right wing is openly buying up major social networks (X, TikTok), and what’s left of our broken mainstream media (CBS, CNN), then trying to bully or bribe any stragglers into being pathetic stewards of major online information spaces (Meta), or feckless echoes of serious journalism (ABC).

However silly and performative Brendan Carr may be, his party’s mission to own, bully, or destroy all the cornerstones of major media is extremely dangerous. It’s the same gambit authoritarians in countries like Hungary and Russia successfully implemented to successfully cement permanent rule. And while it may improve as Trump’s health and influence fails, most of the U.S. responses to date have been pathetic.

With any luck, their hubris and incompetence will be their downfall. But it’s going to necessitate a broader awareness — especially among the Democrat party gerontocracy easily befuddled by the modern information environment — of what’s actually happening and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Carr’s roping in of NPR and PBS comes as the U.S. right wing also tries to destroy whatever was left of U.S. public media. They’re well aware that, untethered from the distorted financial incentives of ad-based corporate media, public media is more likely to be honest about the dangers of idiot authoritarianism (Jon Oliver recently had a good segment on public media that’s worth a watch).

It’s unlikely anything real comes of this inquiry itself. Again, the FCC doesn’t regulate the BBC and NPR and PBS literally had nothing to do with the BBC’s decision. Carr is putting on a cute (but dangerous) show for his mad king and right wing media, wasting taxpayer resources, and trying to scare media organizations away from telling the public the truth about an unpopular, embarrassing administration.

Filed Under: brendan carr, censorship, defamation, disinformation, fcc, free speech, journalism, news distortion, propaganda, uk
Companies: bbc, npr, pbs