Trump’s FCC Starts Harassing Public Broadcasters With Bogus Investigations
from the dismantling-the-truth dept
If you hadn’t noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn’t been meeting the challenges of the current moment very well.
There’s generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and taking a hatchet to the knees of regulators.
Two, the ad-engagement model results in companies that are generally truth averse. They’re afraid of upsetting sources, advertisers, ad-clicking readership, and event sponsors, so they tend to sand all the rough edges off their journalism out of fear the truth (or responses to the truth) might impact overall engagement.
Both combined result in a sort of pseudo-journalistic mush that traffics in feckless “he said, she said” false equivalency journalism and has trouble accurately informing readers of the truth. This, in turn, is easily exploited by corporations, authoritarians and white supremacists, whose shitty, unpopular views tend to be sanitized and normalized by the weak-kneed corporate press.
One potential solution for this is more publicly-funded journalism. Studies generally show publicly-funded journalism tends to result in healthier democracies for the reasons outlined above. Making journalism a publicly-funded public good (and not a business) has great potential. But the right wing generally sees it as a threat because it’s not as prone to soften its criticism of corporatism or authoritarianism.
But after a generation of demonization of the idea, it’s basically a non-starter in the U.S. And the few partially publicly-funded news organizations we do have are already seeing relentless harassment by the Trump administration. NPR (which only gets about 1% of its money from the public) and PBS are already facing sham investigations by Trump earlobe nibbler and FCC boss Brendan Carr.
Now Carr is taking aim at smaller public broadcasters as well. Carr recently sent a letter to WBEZ and twelve other local public broadcasters to inform them they were under investigation for on-air sponsorships, commonly referred to as “underwriting.” Carr is pretending to be concerned that the stations aren’t following FCC rules restricting them from airing traditional commercials:
“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials. It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
About 4.6% (1.6%) of WEBZ’s operating revenue comes from public funding. Publicly-funded broadcasters are restricted from running traditional commercials. So instead, they generally run corporate underwriting spots acknowledging corporate support. WEBZ and the other companies all say they’ve consistently adhered to the rules. Carr has offered no evidence of actual violations.
Carr, a guy who historically lets giant telecom monopolies run endlessly roughshod over U.S. consumers and the market, couldn’t actually care less about these rules or whether these companies are actually violating them (and they likely aren’t). He’s simply looking for something to harass public journalism over.
GOP policies are broadly unpopular. That’s why a cornerstone of the modern radical right involves mercilessly attacking education, academia, journalism, and informed consensus. And another key cornerstone has been to build a vast right wing propaganda machine across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and the internet that tells right wingers what they want to hear 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Public broadcasting (what very little the U.S. has) challenges this paradigm, so it’s an obvious early target for Carr. America has been so consistently conditioned to view publicly-funded journalism as “radical socialism,” and media policy deemed so unimportant, that it’s likely the public and politicians won’t put up much of a fight as what few publicly-funded stations we have are snuffed out by weird zealots.
Filed Under: authoritarianism, brendan carr, broadcasting, consolidation, fcc, harassment, journalism, public funding, public media
Companies: npr, pbs, wbez
Comments on “Trump’s FCC Starts Harassing Public Broadcasters With Bogus Investigations”
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Democracy Vs authoritarianism
We’ve just had a huge victory for free speech here in South Africa. Our Constitutional Court (Supreme Court) has just ruled that chanting “Kill the whites”, even in parliament, is constitutionally protected free speech. We have extensive hate speech laws, calling for all white people to be killed however is not hate speech, unlike in the white supermacist USA. I was banned from Medium for calling for a race war against white people. So much for the US having free speech.
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🙄
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Bro, we know you’re lying. You’re not South African.
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You might be shocked to learn this, but Medium is not subject to the First Amendment. You know, since it’s a private business and not a government body.
If you’re going to use words and phrases that actually mean things, you might want to do the bare minimum research ahead of time regarding what they actually mean.
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You’ll have to forgive Valis for their ignorance. They’re an operative for a Chinese propaganda farm; anything they say can be disregarded as bullshit.
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Now if was the government doing the banning, you might have a point. But a private organization giving you the boot is them telling you they don’t want your shit stinking up their place.
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Liar.
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If these things were really so “broadly unpopular” then that term must not mean what you think it means. Because no one is actually doing anything to make them stop.
And before someone gets pissy, interpretive dance and leaving messages that will be deleted without being played aren’t “doing anything.”
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Oh no! We’d better schedule some extra time to shout at politicians’ answering machines to stop this. It may be pushing the limits of civility, but it’s the only way!
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Don’t shout at politicians. It’s uncivil.
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Let’s do a test-run with the section 230 repeal. Just start plastering “DON’T REPEAL IT YOU MORONS” on the windows and walls of their offices.
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Democrats make is sound like nothing when they claim NPR gets only 1% of it’s funding from the public, but they never tell you that it’s actually much more than that. They dump money into tons of smaller affiliate stations to force them to use their reporting and repeat their opinions. That’s been one of the main issues republicans have with public funded media. It’s turned into a propaganda arm for the left whether you want to admit it or not.
According to Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, there were 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans among the editorial staff at NPR’s D.C. headquarters in 2021. Any media being funded by the state should have a 50/50 staff. Otherwise, it’s just propaganda.
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strange… running this MAGA-coded text through all the best decryption gear, it just comes out as “WHAAAAA WHAAAAA WHAAAA”
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If these things were really so “broadly unpopular” That’s been one of the main issues republicans have with public funded media. It’s turned into a propaganda arm for the left whether you want to admit it or not.