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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.
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:
Trump's censor in chief at the FCC, Brendan Carr, just sent a letter to the heads of BBC, NPR and PBS informing them he's launching a "news distortion" probe into the BBC's editing of a documentary on Trump's Jan. 6 activities.Here it is:
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.
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.
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.
After four years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, and a year after the app was to be banned from app stores via an act of Congress, TikTok remains widely available. The Trump administration insists they hashed out a deal with Bytedance to sell the app to Trump’s billionaire buddies (clearly his goal all along), though that too remains in mysterious limbo.
“…after months of panic over the alleged dangers of TikTok, Congress has spent the year putting up relatively little fuss as Trump repeatedly extended TikTok’s sales timeline in clear violation of the divest-or-ban law.”
The Verge contacted a dozen current and former lawmakers, many of whom were previously incredibly vocal about the dire threat posed by the app, who suddenly don’t much want to talk about it. The only one that was even willing to give a statement, Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell, didn’t really say anything useful:
““Congress is still waiting to get briefed on how the TikTok sale would actually stop Chinese algorithms from causing harm to U.S. citizens, U.S. military, and U.S. interests,” she said. “The lack of transparency has caused concerns for both Democrats and Republicans who are still waiting for secure briefings on how to stop malign actions.”
You might recall that Biden championed the ban, then refused to enforce it on his way out the door. Trump followed this up by promising to fix everything with a deal in 75 days, then extended that deadline when China predictably balked. Repeatedly.
Last September, Trump finally announced that he’d struck a deal with ByteDance to offload 45 percent of the app to Oracle (Trump’s friend Larry Ellison), Silver Lake (Michael Dell is a top investor), and Abu Dhabi’s MGX — as well as possibly Rupert Murdoch.
It’s kind of the worst of all possible outcomes. The deal maintains the app’s supposedly problematic connections to China, but it adds a layer of domestic corruption as Trump offloads control of the app to his billionaire buddies. Including Larry Ellison, who (with the help of his nepobaby son David) is clearly making a play to dominate whatever’s left of establishment U.S. media.
It remains unclear if China actually supports — and will allow — such a deal. Trump has implied that President Xi Jinping has given approval, but there’s been little public forward momentum despite a meeting between Trump and Xi in both June and late October. And even then, it’s not clear such a deal would be aligned with the law, notes The Verge:
“Even if China accepts the deal, it’s not clear the agreement meets the legal requirements for divestiture. Licensing the TikTok algorithm could potentially constitute an ongoing operational relationship between the US entity and ByteDance, which is explicitly barred by the law.”
I’ve noted more times than I can count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for all companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data, be it TikTok or the myriad of super dodgy apps, telecoms, and hardware vendors monetizing your phone usage.
It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate. We’d push for media consolidation limits and education media literacy reforms common in countries like Finland.
TikTok’s Chinese ownership did pose some very real legitimate security, privacy, and NatSec concerns, but the folks “fixing” the problem were never competent or good faith actors, and the push to ban hijack TikTok was always really about ego, money, information control, and protecting Facebook from competition from a foreign company it clearly couldn’t out-innovate.
Now all of the folks who were so breathless about the need for a ban — from Brendan Carr to large cross sections of Congress — are suddenly all weirdly mute as the proposal sits in policy limbo somewhere between Trump’s rank corruption and raw, blistering congressional incompetence.
There are lots of ways things play out when it comes to fans of multiplayer video games building out their own host servers to play them. Sometimes fans set those servers up simply because they can do it better and more securely than the publisher… and then the publisher takes them down because of intellectual property concerns. Sometimes gamers simply want to play an older version of an online game, before the publisher pushes out a bunch of updates and expansion packs… and the publisher takes them down because of intellectual property concerns. And, rarely, sometimes the publisher ends its official support and hosting of a game’s servers and actually acts human and cool by giving fans a cheap license to host their own servers to keep the game alive.
The most frustrating version of this sort of thing is when a publisher fully ends support for a game, shuts down its servers, and then prevents any and all fans from ever playing the game again over IP concerns. And there can be no more stark example of this than Concord, an online game that Sony shut down 2 weeks (!!!) after its release, over a year ago.
A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.
The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”
Those DMCA takedowns came from MarkScan, a longtime partner of Sony that looks around the internet for anything remotely resembling IP infractions and fires off DMCA notices. No demands about the actual game servers have been made… yet. And that makes this all the more strange. MarkScan, presumably at the behest of Sony, is taking down gameplay videos for a game that simply doesn’t exist outside of this fan effort. There are a billion gameplay videos of Sony games that are actually active and out in the world, but these get taken down?
And, again, it’s the absurdity that is the real star here. Concord officially existed for 2 whole weeks in 2024. Sony shut it down and refunded the money of any buyer that wanted one. It shut down the studio that made the game. So when some actual fans of the game come along and want to revive it on their own, Sony starts issuing threats?
“We’re choosing to not make this game available and insist you don’t either.”
While the team behind Concord Delta hasn’t been contacted by Sony directly, the YouTube video takedowns have put the group in something of a defensive crouch. “Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites [to our Discord server] for the time being,” Red wrote on the Discord, as reported by The Game Post.
Of course, Sony could also decide to simply look the other way and let players enjoy a game the company seems to have no interest in officially supporting. That’s what Nintendo appears to be doing with fan projects like The Pretendo Network and WiiLink, which restore online functionality that’s no longer officially available on classic Nintendo consoles.
When you manage to make Nintendo look relatively fan-friendly, it should be obvious you’ve done something horribly wrong.
You’ve heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there’s a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it.
This story comes via a fascinating Sporkful podcast episode where reporter Paul Karolyi spent years investigating why Colorado-style pizza remains trapped in obscurity while other regional styles became national phenomena.
The whole episode is worth listening to for the detective work alone, but the trademark angle reveals something important about how intellectual property thinking can strangle cultural movements in their cradle.
Here’s the thing about pizza “styles”: they become styles precisely because they spread. New York, Chicago, Detroit, New Haven—these aren’t just individual restaurant concepts, they’re cultural phenomena adopted and adapted by hundreds of restaurants. That widespread adoption creates the network effects that make a “style” valuable: customers seek it out, restaurants compete to perfect it, food writers chronicle its evolution.
Colorado-style pizza never got that chance. When Karolyi dug into why, he discovered that Beau Jo’s—the restaurant credited with inventing the style—had locked it up legally. When he asked the owner’s daughter if other restaurants were making Colorado-style pizza, her response was telling:
We’re um a trademark, so they cannot.
Really?
Yes.
Beau owns a trademark for Colorado style pizza.
Yep.
When Karolyi finally tracked down the actual owner, Chip (after years of trying, which is its own fascinating subplot), he expected to hear about some grand strategic vision behind the trademark. Instead, he got a masterclass in reflexive IP hoarding:
Cuz it’s different and nobody else is doing that. So, why not do it Colorado style? I mean, there’s Chicago style and there’s Pittsburgh style and Detroit and everything else. Um, and we were doing something that was what was definitely different and um um licensing attorney said, “Yeah, we can do it” and we were able to.
That’s it. No business plan. No licensing strategy. Just “some lawyer said we can do it” so they did. This is the IP-industrial complex in microcosm: lawyers selling trademark applications because they can, not because they should.
I pressed my case to Chip that abandoning the trademark so others could also use it could actually be good for his business.
“If more places made Colorado style pizza, the style itself would become more famous, which would make more people come to Beau Jo’s to try the original. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, like everyone would know that Beau Jo was the originator. Like, do you ever worry or maybe do you think that the trademark has possibly hindered the spread of this style of pizza that you created that you should be getting credit for?”
“Never thought about it.”
“Well, what do you think about it now?”
“I don’t know. I have to think about that. It’s an interesting thought. I’ve never thought about it. I’m going to look into it. I’m going to look into it. I’m going to talk to some people and um I’m not totally opposed to it. I don’t know that it would be a good idea for us, but I’m willing to look at it.”
A few weeks later, Karolyi followed up with Chip. Predictably, the business advisors had circled the wagons. They “unanimously” told him not to give up the trademark—because of course they did. These are the same people who profit from maintaining artificial scarcity, even when it demonstrably hurts the very thing they’re supposedly protecting.
And so Colorado-style pizza remains trapped in its legal cage, known only to a handful of tourists who stumble across Beau Jo’s locations. A culinary innovation that could have sparked a movement instead became a cautionary tale about how IP maximalism kills the things it claims to protect.
This case perfectly illustrates the perverse incentives of modern IP thinking. We’ve created an entire industry of lawyers and consultants whose job is to convince business owners to “protect everything” on the off chance they might license it later. Never mind that this protection often destroys the very value they’re trying to capture.
The trademark didn’t just fail to help Beau Jo’s—it actively harmed them. As Karolyi documents in the podcast, the legal lockup has demonstrably scared off other restaurateurs from experimenting with Colorado-style pizza, ensuring the “style” remains a curiosity rather than a movement. Fewer competitors means less innovation, less media attention, and fewer customers seeking out “the original.” It’s a masterclass in how to turn potential network effects into network defects.
Compare this to the sriracha success story. David Tran of Huy Fong Foods deliberately avoided trademarking “sriracha” early on, allowing dozens of competitors to enter the market. The result? Sriracha became a cultural phenomenon, and Huy Fong’s distinctive rooster bottle became the most recognizable brand in a category they helped create. Even as IP lawyers kept circling, Tran understood what Chip apparently doesn’t:
“Everyone wants to jump in now,” said Tran, 70. “We have lawyers come and say ‘I can represent you and sue’ and I say ‘No. Let them do it.’” Tran is so proud of the condiment’s popularity that he maintains a daily ritual of searching the Internet for the latest Sriracha spinoff.
Sometimes the best way to protect your creation is to let it go. But decades of IP maximalist indoctrination have made this counterintuitive wisdom almost impossible to hear. Even when presented with a clear roadmap for how abandoning the trademark could grow his business, Chip couldn’t break free from the sunk-cost fallacy and his advisors’ self-interested counsel.
The real tragedy isn’t just that Colorado-style pizza remains obscure. It’s that this story plays out thousands of times across industries, with creators choosing artificial scarcity over organic growth, protection over proliferation. Every time someone trademarks a taco style or patents an obvious business method, they’re making the same mistake Chip made: confusing ownership with value creation.
When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”. Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and yet leave the original behind. For a quarter of a century, the open access movement has been fighting to break those virtual chains for academic works, and to allow anyone freely to read and make copies of the knowledge contained in online virtual libraries.
The detailed history of the movement can be found in Chapter 3 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). As the timeline there, and posts on this blog both make clear, the open access movement has made only limited progress despite the enormous effort expended by many dedicated individuals. Moreover the open access idea has been embraced and then subverted by the academic publishers whose greed and selfishness it was meant to fight.
One version of open access, known as the “diamond” variant, still offers hope that the goals of free access to knowledge for everyone could still be achieved. But even this minimalist approach to academic publishing requires funding, which raises questions about its long-term sustainability. Economic issues also lie at the heart of wider discussions about what could replace copyright, which was born in the analogue world, and whose dysfunctional nature in the digital environment is evident every day.
Walled Culture the book concludes with a look at perhaps the most promising alternative model, whereby “true fans” support directly the creators whose work they value. This approach can also be applied to open access. In this case, the “true fans” of the research work published in papers and books are the academic libraries, acting on behalf of the people who use them. There are various ways for them to support the journals their academics want to access, but one of the most promising is “subscribe to open” (S2O), which helps publishers convert traditional journals into open access. The idea was formalized by Raym Crow, Richard Gallagher, Kamran Naim in 2019. Here’s their explanation of how it works:
S2O offers a journal’s current subscribers continued access at a discount off the regular subscription price. If current subscribers participate in the S2O offer, the publisher opens the content covered by that year’s subscription. If participation is not sufficient – for example, if some subscribers delay renewing in the expectation that they can gain access without participating – then the content remains gated. Because the publisher does not guarantee that the content will be opened unless all subscribers participate in the offer, institutions that value access to the content – demonstrably, the journal’s current subscribers – must either subscribe conventionally (at full price) or participate in S2O (at a discount) to ensure continued access. The offer is repeated every year, with the opening of each year’s content contingent on sufficient participation.
As with the “true fans” model, supporting S2O journals is in the self-interest of libraries, which receive subscriptions to journals their academics want, and for a lower price. But there is a collateral benefit for society because everyone else also receives access to the knowledge contained in those titles. Publishers receive a guaranteed subscription income up front, and as a consequence of the open access route, they can also reach a larger audience. For example, when the Annual Review of Public Health publication tried out the S2O model, its monthly usage factor went up by a factor of eight. Since that successful trial, the S2O model has gone from strength to strength, as a review article published at the end of last year explains:
As of 2024, thanks to the Subscribe to Open model, over 180 journals have been able to publish entire volumes in open access, which would never have been possible otherwise because of the shortcomings of the [article processing charge] models for these journals and their respective disciplines. The S2O model continues to grow, with more publishers set to launch their S2O offerings in 2025.
In August, the prestigious Royal Society announced that it would be moving eight of its subscription journals to S2O. Among those titles is Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world’s longest-running scientific journal. In an article reflecting on that move, Rod Cookson, publishing director of The Royal Society, explained why he and other forward-thinking publishers are fans of S2O:
It is cost neutral and a relatively small change through which libraries can enable entire journals to become open access. This combination of simplicity and transparency has generated enthusiasm for S2O among librarians the world over. Publishers now need to demonstrate to those librarians that in addition to being aligned with their missions, S2O delivers a return on investment that justifies their expenditure. With sensible features that make the S2O proposition work well for both libraries and publishing houses—like multi-year agreements, “premium benefits” for S2O supporters, and collective sales packages—S2O will continue to grow as a trusted and durable model for delivering open access.
S2O represents a successful application of the true fans idea in the context of academic publishing. But perhaps supporters of open access should embrace even more of the true fan spirit and look to the example of fan fiction to help re-imagine scholarly publishing. That, at least, is the bold idea of Caroline Ball, who is the community engagement lead for the Open Book Collective, and whose advocacy work appeared in Walled Culture four years ago. Here’s why she thinks academic research should be more like fan fiction:
At first glance, fanfiction—non-commercial works created by fans who reimagine and remix existing stories, characters, and worlds—and academic research may seem worlds apart. But look closer, and both are practices of deep engagement, intertextual interpretation, and knowledge creation.
Fanfiction doesn’t just regurgitate stories; it interrogates, reinvents, and expands on them, often filling in gaps and exclusions left offscreen. Likewise, scholarship builds on prior work, challenges assumptions, and contributes new insights. Both are iterative, dialogic, and community based. And both, at their best, come from a place of passion and curiosity.
Her post explains how Archive of Our Own (AO3), a community-run digital repository for fan fiction, works, and why it could be a model for a new kind of open access:
Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a community-run digital repository for fanfiction. Launched in 2008 by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), AO3 is entirely open access. It charges nothing to publish, nothing to read, and is powered by open-source code and volunteer labor. As of May 2025 (according to the OTW Communications Committee), it hosts over 15 million works across 71,880 fandoms and sees a daily average of 94 million hits.
Ball goes on to suggests ways in which scholarly publishing could learn from that evident success. Specific areas include AO3’s flexible metadata system; its innovative approach to reviews and comments; its “format agnosticism”, accepting any kind of contribution; and the way it re-imagines recognition and reputation. In summary, she writes:
AO3 reminds us that platforms can be built by and for communities, without extractive profit models or exclusionary hierarchies. It shows what’s possible when infrastructure is treated as a public good, and when participation is scaffolded, not gated. And crucially, AO3 demonstrates how practices that have been piloted in isolation across the scholarly landscape—open peer commentary, volunteer governance, flexible metadata, inclusive formats—can be woven together into a single, sustainable system.
The S2O model described above is a welcome addition to the ways in which sustainable open access can be brought in by publishers. But ultimately Ball is right in emphasizing that universal and unconstrained access to knowledge will only be achieved when the entire scholarly publishing system is re-invented with that goal in mind. It’s well past time for all the fans of open access to unite in this endeavor, and to do away with today’s digital chained libraries forever.
When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television.
He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said, a comment that became an internet meme as some Portland residents juxtaposed it with tranquil images of the city.
Trump didn’t say which channel he watched; he said at one point he saw something “today” and at another “last night.”
The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
He later said he’d told Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, that “unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.”
ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed more than 700 video clips posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others in the three months preceding the Sept. 4 broadcast.
The review found that the news network repeatedly provided a misleading picture of what was happening in Portland.
As The Guardian and The Oregonian/OregonLive have reported, Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025. We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests. Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.
Fox News chyrons about Portland the week of Trump’s remarks carried phrases like “violent demonstrators,” “protesters riot,” “anti-I.C.E. Portland rioters” and “war-like protests.” One host said protesters were attacking federal officers.
This portrayal of protesters as routinely instigating violence or rioting was also misleading.
As ProPublica reported last week, most clashes between protesters and police before the Fox News segment did not result in any criminal charges or arrests alleging protesters committed violence. What’s more, based on news releases from federal and local authorities, charges and arrests for assault, arson or destruction of property were almost entirely confined to a period that ended the night of July 4.
Videos after that date captured numerous images of federal officers forcefully moving in on protesters without corresponding criminal charges alleging protester violence.
A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer requests to comment on its officers’ tactics.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said of action on the ground in Portland: “This isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the left have claimed, it’s radical violence. President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop.”
Here’s how Fox News’ coverage of the Portland story was misleading.
Fox News Said It Was 2025. It Wasn’t.
Protests in 2020 in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a police officer attracted large, sometimes violent crowds to Portland — along with a federal law enforcement response authorized by Trump.
The protests outside the ICE facility have typically been far smaller. Still, Fox spliced footage from 2020 into its coverage this year and claimed it was from 2025.
The Fox News correspondent in the segment that aired the night Trump was watching TV said: “On this night in late June, police used tear gas.”
A Sept. 4 Fox News segment aired footage from 2020. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
The accompanying image appears to be not from the ICE building but from the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, more than a mile away. A nearly identical scene was shown in a Fox News video five years earlier. Footage that aired Sept. 4, shot at a slightly different angle, blurs out spots where graffiti was visible on the building in Fox’s July 2020 broadcast.
Almost immediately after showing the courthouse scene, the segment cuts to another image as the correspondent says, “federal police used tear gas and flashbangs.”
On screen at that moment is a U.S. Navy veteran who was pepper-sprayed and repeatedly struck with a baton. But it didn’t happen in September 2025. The video was posted on social media on July 18, 2020.
A Sept. 4 Fox News segment aired a clip originally posted to X on July 16, 2020. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
The Fox News segment about the ICE protests soon shows an American flag burning.
That image was posted on social media July 16, 2020.
The location: the base of a downtown Portland statue more than a mile away from the ICE building where protests are happening in 2025.
After mislabeling 2020 events as 2025, Fox’s Sept. 4 evening broadcast explicitly drew a connection between the two periods.
“The protest chaos, which began with riots aimed at social justice in 2020, has severely damaged Portland’s reputation,” the correspondent said.
Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast explicitly drew a connection between 2025 and the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd. Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
The dramatic footage at this moment shows fires in the street and was broadcast on Fox on Aug. 19, 2020, the day after a crowd smashed through windows and set items on fire in the headquarters for the government of Multnomah County, where Portland is located.
Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast used footage originally broadcast Aug. 19, 2020. Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
We don’t know for certain which broadcast got Trump thinking about Portland. The White House did not respond to questions about what Trump watched. But the president said on Sept. 5 that what he’d seen about Portland on TV was “unbelievable.”
“I didn’t know that was still going on,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”
The reality: Portland’s 2020 social justice protests, which resulted in hundreds of arrests and continued for months, turned sporadic by early 2021. Protests in years since have led to occasional property damage, but nothing in Portland has matched the scale of events that followed Floyd’s death.
Portland police Chief Bob Day said at a Sept. 29 press conference that the city had been inaccurately portrayed through the lens of the protests in 2020 and 2021.
“What’s actually happening, and the response we’re seeing both from Portlanders and from the Portland Police Bureau,” Day said, “is not in line with that national narrative. And it is frustrating.”
A Riot That Wasn’t
In a Sept. 2 segment featuring the video from a day earlier, anchor Bill Hemmer said it shows “riots raging.” Anchor Trace Gallagher teased another Sept. 2 news segment by once again showing the video, saying, “It’s a riot outside a Portland ICE facility.”
On a Sept. 2 segment featuring Katie Daviscourt’s Sept. 1 video, anchor Bill Hemmer describes the Sept. 1 protests as “riots raging.” Videos show the violent moments that happened after federal police advanced on protesters. Fox News
The Sept. 4 segment shows Julie Parrish, an attorney for a neighbor of the ICE facility, accusing Portland police of saying, “Meh, we’re just gonna let violent rioters do this for 80 straight nights.”
The physical behavior of protesters that was captured on the video is not violent. The camera instead shows federal agents advancing on them. In the moments before officers tossed munitions into the crowd, videos show, one protester was blowing bubbles. The Portland police did not declare a riot, a legal designation that allows for an elevated police use of force. (They declared a riot just once, a police spokesperson said, on June 14.)
The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought. Katie Daviscourt, a Trump-aligned commentator who filmed the clips, noted on X that protesters were having dance parties and that their main problems were “not leaving restricted areas, burning a flag, and possessing a deadly object (guillotine).”
ProPublica found a similar pattern for the three months before Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast: clashes that on most days and nights had no criminal allegations of protester violence to explain them.
After dozens of arrests and charges were announced in June through July 4, federal prosecutors accused just three people of crimes at the ICE building in the roughly two months leading up to Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast.
During that same two-month time frame, ProPublica’s review found numerous instances of police using force: videos from more than 20 days or nights with federal officers grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling, firing on or using other munitions on protesters.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression later asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
Asked whether Fox News accurately represented her footage, Daviscourt said: “I stand by my four months of accurate reporting.”
Parrish told ProPublica she had collected evidence that “shows ongoing and persistent activity” outside the facility that under statute and police directive “would be considered riotous, unlawful assembly and/or disorderly conduct.” She declined to share this evidence, saying it was privileged as part of her client’s file.
Her lawsuit on behalf of a neighbor living near the ICE facility, which sought to require police to enforce Portland’s noise ordinance, was dismissed.
The Reappearing Neighbor
A Sept. 5 “Fox & Friends” segment showed a neighbor from an apartment building confronting protesters over noise, shouting at protesters: “Turn that (bleep) down, it’s midnight! … We the people need sleep!”
Fox said it happened Tuesday, which would have been Sept. 2. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “This has been going on for months now, but a lot of this since Labor Day,” as the video shown on screen sandwiches footage of the neighbor between other scenes from the Labor Day protest.
“This is a chaotic city,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said.
Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
The next day, the clip of the neighbor appeared again on Fox News. This time, the network said the footage was from Wednesday, or Sept. 3.
Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
In reality, the confrontation was captured on video months before. Daviscourt published the video on June 29 on X.
On the two September nights that Fox said the neighbor’s confrontation happened, ProPublica’s review found no videos of violent clashes posted on social media, and federal authorities announced no arrests.
For example, according to a Portland police email from 11:22 p.m. on Sept. 3: “There are still about 20 people hanging around but only 4 were even on the sidewalk in front of the building.”
Misrepresentations Continue After Trump’s Guard Order
On Sept. 28, the day Trump’s order was implemented, a Fox News broadcast played a clip of Kotek saying that Guard troops were not needed in Portland, then immediately cut to a clip of a hectic scene of protesters clashing with police.
“Wish she could see some of those images,” the anchor said. Sarcastically, as a co-anchor chuckled, she added: “Look at that. Just a peaceful protest.”
A small box on the screen showed the footage wasn’t from Oregon.
Let’s say, hypothetically, you want to gerrymander some congressional districts to help your party win more seats. Here are a couple of options:
Do blatant partisan gerrymandering, which is cynical and corrupt but in most cases (tragically and unfortunately) perfectly legal under current US law.
Do racial gerrymandering, which will definitely get you sued and probably lose in court for violating the fairly clear Voting Rights Act restrictions on racial classifications.
Which do you choose? If you said “obviously option 1,” congratulations, you understand the law better than the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. Because the Trump administration just got legally smacked down for picking option 2.
Trump’s broader redistricting push kicked off partisan gerrymandering efforts across the country, including in California where voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure (Prop 50) to temporarily redistrict solely to counteract Texas’ gerrymandering. That measure originally included a provision that it would only go into effect if Texas went through with its plan, but that provision was removed before the vote. The (unlikely, but suddenly possible) end result now might be that California gerrymanders, while Texas doesn’t. Oops.
When Trump first demanded that Texas redistrict to stop Democrats from winning seats in the House, Texas Republicans initially balked. This is now long-forgotten history, but it’s true. They were a bit worried about how all this would go over.
The push from Washington has unnerved some Texas Republicans, who worry that reworking the boundaries of Texas House seats to turn Democratic districts red by adding reliably Republican voters from neighboring Republican districts could backfire in an election that is already expected to favor Democrats.
But then Trump’s team of legal geniuses found an innovative solution: they reframed their partisan gerrymandering as a civil rights imperative, thereby transforming a legal (if obnoxious) political maneuver into an illegal racial classification scheme.
The mastermind behind this strategy was Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s choice to run the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. (You might remember Dhillon from her previous career filing lawsuits on behalf of aggrieved conservatives who felt insufficiently appreciated.) But her letter to Texas officials demanding race-based redistricting represents a new level of culture war-driven legal incompetence.
It’s really worth appreciating just how stupid and counterproductive this letter was, as is laid out by the judge in this case.
Judge Brown—who clerked for current Texas Governor Greg Abbott when Abbott was on the Texas Supreme Court and who previously blocked Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate—is hardly what anyone would call an “activist leftist judge.” Which makes his scathing assessment of the Trump administration’s approach all the more damning.
Because those Texas legislators were so hesitant, Dhillon sent them a letter trying to argue that the state was violating civil rights laws if they didn’t redistrict along racial lines, and that apparently kicked off all this nonsense.
Judge Brown pointed out how absurd all this is:
Earlier this year, President Trump began urging Texas to redraw its U.S. House map to create five additional Republican seats. Lawmakers reportedly met that request to redistrict on purely partisan grounds with apprehension. When the Governor announced his intent to call a special legislative session, he didn’t even place redistricting on the legislative agenda.
But when the Trump Administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board.On July 7, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice (“DOJ”), sent a letter (“the DOJ Letter”) to the Governor and Attorney General of Texasmaking the legally incorrect assertion that four congressional districts in Texas were “unconstitutional” because they were “coalition districts”—majority-non-White districtsin which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority. In the letter,DOJ threatened legal action if Texas didn’t immediately dismantle and redraw these districts—a threat based entirely on their racial makeup. Notably, the DOJ Letter targeted only majority-non-White districts.Any mention of majority-White Democrat districts—which DOJ presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial—was conspicuously absent.
So let’s be clear about what happened here. Texas Republicans were reluctant to do a straightforward partisan gerrymander. Then the Trump DOJ came along and said “actually, you have to do this because of race,” and suddenly everyone was enthusiastic. The racist incompetence is staggering.
Once Dhillon gave them the racial justification, Texas immediately jumped on board:
Two days later, citing the DOJ Letter, the Governor added redistricting to the special session’s legislative agenda. In doing so, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve DOJ’s concerns.In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race.In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts.
Incredibly, the MAGA GOP just kept admitting over and over again that they did this for racial reasons:
The bill’s sponsors’ statements suggest they adopted those changes because such a map would be an easier sell than a purely partisan one. The Speaker of the House also issued a press release celebrating that the bill satisfactorily addressed DOJ’s “concerns.” Other high-ranking legislators stated in media interviews that the Legislature had redistricted not for the political goal of appeasing President Trump nor of gaining five Republican U.S. House seats, but to achieve DOJ’s racial goal of eliminating coalition districts.
Their own flimsy excuse transformed what would have been legal (if cynical) partisan gerrymandering into illegal racial gerrymandering, violating the Voting Rights Act. They literally were so desperate to lie about the unpalatable reasons for their gerrymandering that they moved from the obnoxious and corrupt version to the blatantly illegal justification. And didn’t even stop to think that might sink the entire enterprise.
You know how they say “the coverup is worse than the crime?” Well, here, it’s basically just the coverup that is the crime. If they had just done this for the real reasons they were likely doing this (to stifle Democrats), it had a much higher chance of passing judicial muster.
Judge Brown, for his part, seems almost personally offended by the quality of Dhillon’s legal work. He publishes her entire letter in the ruling, and then writes:
It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors. Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General—who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration—describe the DOJ Letter as “legally[] unsound,” “baseless,” “erroneous,” “ham-fisted,” and “a mess.”
Don’t hold back now.
The judge walks through every bit of the letter and just how ridiculous it is. Here’s just a snippet, but it goes on like this for a while:
Legally and factually, DOJ had no valid argument that the Legislature should restore the House map to some preexisting racial equilibrium since Petteway supplanted Campos. Far from seeking to “rectify . . . racial gerrymandering,” the DOJ Letter urges Texas to inject racial considerations into what Texas insists was a race-blind process.
But what about DOJ’s assertion that “TX-33 is [a] racially-based coalition district that resulted from a federal court order years ago”? If a court forced Texas to draw CD 33 as a coalition district based on Campos’s discredited interpretation of VRA § 2, can’t the Legislature redraw that district now that VRA § 2 no longer requires coalition districts?
The short answer is that this is another one of the DOJ Letter’s many inaccuracies.
As the Judge explains, if Dhillon and the Trump administration had just told them to go for blatantly partisan redistricting, it might have worked. But they didn’t.
Here too, if the Governor had explicitly directed the Legislature to amend the congressional map to improve Republican performance, the Plaintiff Groups would then face a higher burden to prove that the motivation for the 2025 redistricting was racial rather than political. Instead, by incorporating DOJ’s race-based redistricting request by reference, the Governor was asking the Legislature to give DOJ the racial rebalancing it wanted—and for the reasons that DOJ cited.
Think about the strategic incompetence here. Everyone involved was apparently so desperate to avoid saying “we’re doing partisan gerrymandering” that they kept loudly announcing “we’re doing racial gerrymandering instead!” They traded a probably legal (if obnoxious) justification for an obviously illegal (and still awful) one.
When given an opportunity to publicly proclaim that his motivation for adding redistricting to the legislative agenda was solely to improve Republicans’ electoral prospects at President Trump’s request, the Governor denied any such motivation. Instead, the Governor expressly stated that his predominant motivation was racial: he “wanted to remove . . . coalition districts” and “provide more seats for Hispanics.” The fact that the racially reconfigured districts would happen to favor Republicans was, to paraphrase the Governor’s own words, just a fortuitous coincidence.
The most remarkable part of all this? Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton actually tried to save them. He sent a letter to the Trump administration essentially pushing back on Dhillon’s demands, while saying “hey, you know we could just do this for partisan reasons, right? That would be legal?” But they were so bought into the racism that nobody listened.
At the same time the Governor was announcing the 2025 Map’s racial objectives to the press,the Attorney General of Texas was saying the opposite.Just two days after the Governor added redistricting to the legislative agenda based on DOJ’s “constitutional concerns,” the Attorney General sent DOJ a response to its letter.That response said essentially the same thing we say above—that the change in law effected by Petteway cast no doubt on the legality of the 2021 Map, since there’s no indication that the 2021 Legislature drew any coalition districts for legal-compliance reasons that it wouldn’t have drawn anyway for race-neutral reasons like partisanship. Although the Attorney General doesn’t say so explicitly,the purpose behind his letter appears to have been to refocus the redistricting dialogue toward permissible considerations like partisanship, politics, and traditional districting criteria—and away from legally fraught considerations like race.
If that was the letter’s purpose, it didn’t work.
Just a fantastic level of failure all around.
Again, this isn’t some “activist leftist judge” as MAGA would have you believe—we’ve already established Brown’s conservative credentials.
Now, the case goes straight to the Supreme Court (skipping the Fifth Circuit), and Paxton has already announced plans to appeal quickly. He’s claiming the map is “entirely legal,” which is a bold stance given that his own office tried to warn everyone this was illegal. But Paxton’s capacity for hypocrisy has never been his limiting factor.
Will the Supreme Court overrule Judge Brown? It’s entirely possible—perhaps likely. The Court has spent much of the past year rubber-stamping Trump administration priorities, often without much explanation. But Judge Brown clearly wrote this opinion with the Supreme Court in mind, and specifically with Chief Justice John Roberts in mind. He opens the entire ruling by quoting Roberts’ own 2007 opinion about race-based classifications:
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Will that convince any of the motivated SCOTUS Justices to admit to what’s going on here? Perhaps not, but they’ll have to bend over backwards to ignore what’s happened here, given that the Trump administration served up the illegal basis for this decision on a silver platter for all involved.
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This won’t matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation’s allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government.
But it should matter to everyone else. The United States was once the leader of the free world, even with all of its current and historical flaws. It’s no longer interested in any version of “freedom” that doesn’t involve making people feel it’s alright to engage in open bigotry. And it no longer deserves to be called the “leader” of anything, since it’s in the process of devolving into an authoritarian state with white Christian nationalist desires.
The mass deportation program that has been running at full speed since Trump retook the Oval Office has been abjectly and objectively miserable. Irrational hatred is now just public policy, overseen by grinning “Village of the Damned”-esque kids with swastikas pinwheeling in their creepy, dead eyes.
Not the UK has been much better for most of its history. It spent a lot of its history engaging in open racism and bigotry-as-public-policy colonialism. Even now, its desire to be more harmful to immigrants, privacy rights, and anything not completely Union Jacked has seen it devolve in the same direction the United States is now headed, albeit with a bit more internal division.
But Trump has gone so far that not even this new wave of UK Exceptionalism is willing to endorse it. Sure, it’s willing to be awful towards its own populace regularly, but it’s not exactly ready to sign up for an eventual appearance at The Hague. Here’s Natasha Bertrand, reporting on a sudden severing of surveillance access by the UK government in response to the administration’s killings of people in international waters.
The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
[…]
[S]hortly after the US began launching lethal strikes against the boats in September, however, the UK grew concerned that the US might use intelligence provided by the British to select targets. British officials believe the US military strikes, which have killed 76 people, violate international law, the sources said. The intelligence pause began over a month ago, they said.
The UK government did the right thing. Even if some in the UK government might be aligned with Trump in terms of going full Duterte, there’s no reason to continue to act as an accomplice in the extrajudicial killings. Even if the political winds fail to shift in the United States at the end of Trump’s second term, the man who has spent his entire presidential career antagonizing most of the rest of the world has made enough enemies that he won’t have many supporters if an internationally-backed prosecution attempt arises in the future.
Even military officials are starting to back away from the boat strike program, even as the Trump-beholden DOJ Office of Legal Counsel continues to issue questionable memos that claim “this all very legal, actually.” It certainly doesn’t look legal, which creates some problems in the court of public opinion. In courts that actually have the power to do something about it, these outrageous claims of absolute executive power have already worn thin.
As for the official US response, it’s limited to this for the moment:
The British embassy in Washington and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. A Pentagon official told CNN that the department “doesn’t talk about intelligence matters.”
LMAO. The Defense Department talks about “intelligence matters” in chats that have included journalists, family members, and family lawyers. And Trump himself has unilaterally (and very unofficially) declassified intelligence information by splattering it all over the pages of TruthSocial and X. All that’s being said here is that the government won’t talk about things it doesn’t want to discuss, right up until an administration official (or Trump himself) decides it’s time to get bitchy about this regime being treated like the untrustworthy piece of shit it is.
That will probably happen sooner, rather than later. As the CNN report notes, both Canada and Colombia have done the same thing, preventing the US military from using intelligence these countries have collected to target people in boats in international waters. Make America A Pariah Again is going just great.
