A bipartisan roster of former top-level FCC officials have submitted a filing to the Trump FCC blasting the agency’s ongoing violations of the First Amendment and urging it to terminate its phony “investigations” into ABC — including the unprecedented early ownership review of the company’s broadcast licenses.
In the filing, former FCC officials allied under the banner of the Protect Democracy Project outline how the early “ownership review” of ABC’s eight broadcast licenses is really just a pretense to punish ABC and Disney for broadcasting speech the Trump administration doesn’t like, the coalition calling it “a grave violation of both the Communications Act and the Constitution.”
A companion announcement features numerous FCC officials lining up to express their disgust at Brendan Carr and his often-illegal assault on the First Amendment.
“Chairman Carr seems to be laboring under the ill-conceived notion that broadcasters have only partial rights to free speech under the First Amendment,” said Mark Fowler, a Republican who served as Chairman of the FCC from 1981 to 1987. “Just because the FCC issues licenses doesn’t make it the speech police. With this senseless early renewal proceeding, Carr is demonstrating that he has completely lost touch not just with the role of the FCC, but also with his own job description.”
Earlier this year, Trump Republicans were upset that The View hosted Texas Democratic hopeful James Talarico. That triggered an entire fake “investigation” and a threatened revocation of ABC’s broadcast licenses by Carr, who falsely claimed the show had violated the FCC’s dated and irrelevant “equal time” rule requiring that TV stations give equal time to political candidates from both parties.
The FCC has been engaged in several other simultaneous phony investigations of ABC, hoping to punish the company for journalism and comedy critical of the president. The efforts are legally unsupportable assaults on free speech and the First Amendment designed not really to go to court, but to signal to media companies that there are costly legal headaches in store if they joke about, criticize, or simply just platform journalism that’s honest about Trump.
Several of the same former FCC officials participating in this coalition filed a petition with the FCC late last year, urging it to rescind the agency’s news distortion policy, a tool Chairman Carr has abused to try and trample free speech and journalistic freedom.
“This proceeding is an effort to punish ABC and Disney for poorly disguised political reasons,” said Rachelle Chong, a Republican who served as Commissioner of the FCC from 1994 to 1997. “The early review and the allegations are unusual in a typical FCC license review which suggests it is more about a desire to silence speech.”
While the effectiveness of these threats have waned in parallel with Trump’s sagging health and political power; they’ve still been embarrassingly effective at times. The View, for example, has shied away from hosting any politicians at all to avoid further agitating the kakistocracy. And ABC in late 2024 paid Trump $15 million to settle a baseless lawsuit the company would have likely won.
This latest filing was signed by other former FCC officials including Kathryn C. Brown, Rachelle B. Chong, Jerald N. Fritz, Rosemary Harold, William T. Lake, Ruth Milkman, Dennis R. Patrick, Peter Pitsch, Alfred C. Sikes, Gloria Tristani, Tom Wheeler, and Christopher J. Wright.
The filing and complaint are curiously lacking in statements from Democrats, who have been a feckless no show when it comes to competent media reform for the better part of a quarter century. At the same time, many Republicans who have proven solid on free speech issues during authoritarianism, have quietly supported the administration’s assault on the regulatory state and what’s left of competent corporate oversight, the impact of which will have very different, but very fatal, reverberations for decades.
A broad array of other Republican-leaning groups, including the Center for Individual Freedom, Citizens Against Government Waste, and Americans for Tax Reform, also filed complaints this week at the FCC over its ongoing harassment of ABC, showing just how ideologically alone Brendan Carr has become as he wages a sad and desperate war on the First Amendment at the behest of a bumbling tyrant.
Last year the Trump administration announced it would ban Chinese-made drones from the U.S. As I noted at the time, the plan had several problems, not least of which being the Trump administration is a racist, corrupt, dysfunctional mess filled with weirdos and lazy incompetents, primarily interested in assorted personal investment grifts and protecting less popular U.S. companies from having to compete.
Many of the banned drones from companies like DJI are better, cheaper, and more popular among consumers, resulting in a 70 percent market share. Given Trump’s sons are personally invested in drone manufacturing, this has less to do with national security and privacy than it does grift.
The Trump administration has made numerous claims of security risks related to products by companies like DJI, but offered absolutely no hard evidence at any point supporting the claims. We’ve repeatedly seen similar factually challenged policy rhetoric surrounding electric cars, AI, and telecom more broadly (remember how we had to do everything AT&T wanted or risk losing the “race to 5G?”).
As expected, the Trump admin’s plan to ban popular overseas drones isn’t going that well. Consumers are incredibly annoyed that they’ve been cut off from the best and cheapest products on the market. And numerous companies have just changed the labels on Chinese drones and cameras to sneak by the ban in a U.S. market absolutely swimming in Chinese tech imports of all kinds.
It’s created a complicated game of whac-a-mole at the FCC, who first tried to fine offenders, and is now eyeing a broader retroactiveban of these companies as well:
While folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr are saying they’re doing this to protect U.S. consumer privacy and national security (something often parroted by lazy press outlets), none of these folks have any credibility on these subjects, and have actively, repeatedly, made both issues indisputably worse.
The U.S. is too corrupt to pass a meaningful privacy law, which threatens both privacy and national security. I’d also argue that Trump administration corruption is every bit as bad, if not worse, than anything China could do to us at this point. And you’ve seen for yourself how most of the Trump administration’s cybersecurity policies are indistinguishable from a foreign attack.
There’s the added irony that the Trump admin likes to dismantle governance and lobotomize regulators, then try to impose massive new policy plans that require competent governance and regulatory oversight. The press generally adds to the dysfunction by lending the administration policy credibility it didn’t earn in policy areas it clearly doesn’t understand.
I think there’s something to be said for allowing Chinese competitors (in EVs, drones, AI, and everything else) into the country, but also properly funding and staffing your regulators to police labor, competition, NatSec (when they actually arise), and consumer rights abuses.
Greedy zealots in corporate America and the Trump administration don’t want to do that, because it would result in competition and accountability, eroding precious quarterly returns.
So instead you get this sort of incoherent and xenophobic game of whac-a-mole, run by bad faith weirdos like Brendan Carr. Fully supported by many U.S. corporations — whose execs will talk your ear off over cocktails about their love of free market competition and competitive entrepreneurial innovation — right up until better overseas tech arrives and they’re forced to actually try.
Expect more and more of this dumb, xenophobic, pointless protectionist bullshit, especially in AI as the biggest U.S. tech companies, slowly drowning in debt and enshittification, begin to struggle with cheaper and better overseas alternatives in a country now waging open war on science and sound policy.
Earlier this year FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a series of fake investigations into ABC because the network (1) hosted Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico on The View, (2) aired comedians who made fun of the president and his wife, and (3) occasionally engaged in journalism critical of Trump corruption.
ABC and NBC wisely refused to air the speech live, knowing that helping to spread distrust in election integrity in real time would be the opposite of useful journalism. That made Trump mad, so he’s clearly urged Brendan Carr to levy some additional empty threats against ABC:
“I think when you have the President of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that’s something that broadcasters should be carrying. And so, obviously, this is an issue,” Carr told reporters Wednesday. “There have been lots of concerns raised, including by members of Congress, about whether broadcasters and their decisions there comply with the public interest.”
Carr is somewhat vague here because he knows this is a bunch of bullshit.
Obviously it’s ABC’s First Amendment right to determine what it broadcasts and when. Carr has absolutely zero legal role in determining the scheduling lineup of a private company. Carr’s once again pretending that networks that refuse to pander to our mad idiot king will be subjected to FCC review of their public interest obligations affixed to ownership of public airwaves.
As we’ve mentioned countless times already, Carr doesn’t want any of this to actually head to court because he knows it’s an absolute loser on First Amendment grounds. The real goal remains to threaten U.S. media companies with costly and annoying legal headaches if they challenge Republicans or the unpopular president. It’s typical lazy autocrat stuff by weak men who are afraid of words.
Brendan Carr has openly stated in interviews he fancies himself a tough, pit bull enforcer; but as Trump’s health and political power wane, the threats will hold less and less weight. As a result you’ve already seen ABC execs start to show a backbone in their fight with Carr, openly pointing out how he colluded with local right wing broadcast affiliates to manufacture evidence suggesting ABC broke FCC rules (something I’m sure will play great in court).
Carr’s threats will become weaker and weaker until he’s ultimately booted from office by subsequent administrations, at which point he’ll fail upward to some mid-six figure job at a telecom or media think tank, where he’ll spend the rest of his life helping corporate America dismantle whatever’s left of competition, labor, and consumer protection standards.
One of the ironic things, for Carr, is that his authoritarian censorship and saber rattling often draws press and public attention away from all the other terrible things he’s doing, whether it’s destroying media consolidation limits, making life easier on robocallers, dismantling broadband consumer protection standards, or making it easier for giant shitty companies to run amok.
You’d like to think Carr ultimately faces some sort of meaningful accountability for being one of the most censorial, petty, captured, and authoritarian regulators in U.S. history, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what’s left of the country’s already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what’s left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president’s ass.
Current laws (remember those?) prohibit any single local broadcast news company from serving more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The original (good) idea was that this helped protect opinion diversity and competition in the local broadcast news space. Republicans don’t like that, because they want to replace all journalism with right-wing and oligarch friendly propaganda.
Brendan Carr last March had already made it clear he viewed the law as optional when he granted Nexstar Media Group a waiver for its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna. That deal would let the company reach more than half of all U.S. households with what passes as “local news.” Now he’s trying to replace a congressionally-approved law with a “case by case review” dictated by Republican whims:
“Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.”
This is, to be clear, illegal. Something the FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, made clear in her own statement:
“This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder. Congress set the 39 percent national ownership cap in federal law, and only Congress has the authority to raise or eliminate it. The Commission cannot waive away that limit simply because these corporate behemoths want to get out from under it.”
Clearly there will be lawsuits, though they’re likely to drag on until long after Nexstar and Tegna have merged, with future regulators being very unlikely to unwind the transaction. I’d then expect to see Sinclair Broadcasting to merge with the remaining company, creating a monopoly over local broadcast TV.
While people are quick to insist that “who cares, nobody watches this stuff,” they don’t seem to realize that somewhere around 80 million households still watch local broadcast TV channels via antenna, cable TV, streaming providers, or satellite.
As I’ve frequently discussed, most of these local broadcasters deliver a sloppy combination of lazy infotainment and right-wing agitprop, as that viral video about Sinclair Broadcasting made clear a few years back:
Carr’s very unsubtle goal here is to turn the entirety of U.S. local broadcast television into propaganda arms of the U.S. right wing. That’s not an opinion or hyperbole, and he’s well on his way already. It might help if there was a functional opposition party that had made meaningful media reforms a centerpiece of their political platform anytime in the last quarter century.
And this is, of course, just local broadcast TV. We’ve also got Carr’s FCC helping Larry Ellison do the same thing to CBS and CNN. Ellison’s also steadily doing the same thing to TikTok while Elon Musk does the same thing to what used to be Twitter. If you stand back, tilt you head, and squint just right, you might begin to notice a consistent theme.
Here’s a short crash course in U.S. telecom policy.
Giant and very unpopular companies like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter created regional monopolies that work tirelessly to erode all meaningful competition and oversight, resulting in high prices, spotty service, slower speeds, and abysmal customer service. They also pay a bunch of dodgy pseudo-academic “free market” think tanks to insist this is all very innovative and exciting.
Every so often a few Democrats (the handful not too timid to stand up to the telecom lobby) propose the absolute bare minimum policy “solution” that usually involves nibbling around the edges of the actual problem (unchecked monopoly power coddled by corruption). These efforts are very often highly decorative and performative, and very rarely competently enforced.
Enter Republicans, who work seamlessly with the telecom lobby to destroy even these bare-bones proposals, framing them as radical. The result: no real oversight of telecom giants, who then double down on all of their worst behaviors.
This just happens again and again and again in U.S. policy (privacy, net neutrality, predatory business practices). And will keep happening until the U.S. addresses its corruption problems. Which, with a minimum 2.5 years of Trumpism left, doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.
The latest case in point: back during the Biden era, the FCC under Jessica Rosenworcel proposed a new “nutrition label for broadband” that required ISPs break down each individual fee and restriction on your bill. Note it didn’t actually stop ISPs from ripping you off, it just created a mostly voluntary system whereby ISPs were politely asked to list the real price of service, including usage caps and bullshit fees.
Studies found that unsurprisingly, most ISPs didn’t comply and the FCC, even under Biden, didn’t really enforce the rules.
Despite this being, once again, a bare minimum policy effort that didn’t even actually fix the underlying problem and was never meaningfully enforced, the telecom lobby very much didn’t like the idea of having to be transparent. Or the government telling them what to do. So they’ve lobbied the Trump administration to dismantle the requirements:
“The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called “passthrough” fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.”
Great stuff. Very populist. Who wasn’t begging the government to make it easier for big shitty companies to rip you off with bullshit surcharges and fees?
Keep in mind it took the U.S. government thirty-five years of telecom monopoly predation to finally come up with the idea “maybe we politely ask giant telecom monopolies to be semi-honest about their price.” But even that was a bridge too far for a corrupt U.S. federal government.
It should be noted that this most recent “nutrition label” approach was technically required by Congress, which was trying to ensure that the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies in the infrastructure bill resulted in semi-decent broadband. But as I’ve been exploring, the Trump administration has hijacked that program to slather Elon Musk with subsidies, stripping all meaningful oversight in the process.
Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s order rolling back the rules tries to pretend they’re doing this for the sake of consumer clarity:
“However, the Commission’s initial rules, adopted in 2022, resulted in sometimes confusing labels that strayed beyond the statutory framework Congress created, increasing compliance costs for providers in the process. With this order, we refocus the rules on ensuring that consumers have the clear, accurate, and concise information about broadband plans that they want, making the labels a more useful shopping tool.”
That is a blatant lie. Carr is simply folding like a weakling to the demands of Comcast, AT&T and friends. There is no consumer benefit to making broadband pricing less transparent. It simply works to further obscure the real problem: regional monopoly predation, coddled by captured regulators like Carr. Comcast didn’t like having to be even semi-honest about precisely how it rips you off.
To try and avoid making it clear he’s breaking the law and ignoring Congress, Carr is pretending the labels will technically still exist. They will, of course, feature fewer requirements, be harder to find, and there will be absolutely no enforcement should ISPs balk at the rules.
The United States is not a serious country. It’s too corrupt to function in the public interest. And it’s become a strange combination of painful, boring, and pathetic that we have journalists, policymakers, think tankers, and regulators too feckless or captured to be honest about any of it.
The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.
The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.
Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.
Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.
The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.
It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.
However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.
Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.
Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.
“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”
Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.
“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.
The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.
The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”
On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.
American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.
The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.
Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.
An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.
“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”
Shaub called the justification outrageous.
“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”
Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.
Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed FCC chair by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January 2025, attended regularly.
Rosenworcel and several other former commissioners who accepted the tickets did not respond to requests for comment. The one commissioner who didn’t accept a single gift, Nathan Simington, said he received the Kennedy Center invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it “wasn’t my cup of tea.”
A review of 10 years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and speak at conferences. Some of those gifts came from other media companies regulated by the FCC. NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents’ Association dinners, records show. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000. But the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company.
Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. She didn’t address why the practice continued after new ownership took over last year, the purpose of the gifts or whether the tickets posed a conflict of interest.
Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to become the agency’s general counsel, was appointed to serve as a commissioner by Trump during his first term. Since then, Carr has accepted tickets annually, except when the 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his public disclosures.
Carr did not respond to an email request from ProPublica for his latest ethics report, which would indicate whether Paramount also paid for him to attend last December’s gala. The FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.
A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly said officials cannot accept free attendance “offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees.” In 2016, the ethics office tightened its gift requirements, warning officials to avoid any appearance “of loss of impartiality.”
There is an exemption to the gift rules that allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met.
The event must “further agency programs or operations,” and the agency’s interest in an official attending must outweigh “concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties,” according to the federal rules.
As an example, the Office of Government Ethics said an industry-wide seminar attended by more than 100 people could be allowed if the employee’s participation would be in the agency’s interest. But those attending should “represent a range of persons interested in a given matter” and the event must provide a “structured opportunity” to exchange ideas and views among invitees.
The office clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not count even if they, like the honors gala, have a reception before or afterward at which officials can mingle with other attendees.
Canter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said it would be a “stretch” for the FCC to argue the exemptions apply to the Kennedy Center’s annual show, where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud those who are being honored. “It’s not what we would consider a widely attended gathering,” she said.
Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted that federal rules also require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment.
“The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation,” he said, adding that it is an “obvious conflict of interest” for an official to “accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests.”
An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance given to the commissioners said they were told the event met the criteria for the “widely attended gathering” exception. (The source was not authorized to talk publicly about agency legal discussions.)
Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics head, disagreed, saying it would be “hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners” attend the gala.
“What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?” he asked.
Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering. The FCC did not respond to our requests to provide the authorizations for the Paramount tickets or say who authorized them. Two senior ethics officials at the agency, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.
While December’s event came at a particularly sensitive time for Paramount and the FCC, it wasn’t the first.
More than a year earlier, in September 2024, Paramount had filed paperwork seeking the commission’s approval for its merger with Skydance Media. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump later filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited the interview — an accusation CBS denied.
Then in November, less than two weeks after his election victory, Trump declared he would appoint Carr as FCC chair. Almost immediately, Carr accused CBS of biased election coverage and said it would be an obstacle to approving the Paramount-Skydance merger.
That December, Carr and three other commissioners — Rosenworcel, Gomez and Geoffrey Starks — accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.
On Jan. 16, 2025, just days before Rosenworcel stepped down from the commission, she announced the agency was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. She and Gomez called the outcome a victory for the First Amendment.
To resolve Trump’s lawsuit, CBS agreed to pay the president $16 million, a decision criticized by legal experts who decried Trump’s claims as baseless.
Two days after Trump posted on social media that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Paramount-Skydance merger. To meet Carr’s demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson who would evaluate claims of bias. The company also pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
By then, Starks and Simington had unexpectedly stepped down from the commission. Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed by the Senate the previous month.
Trusty and Carr voted in favor of the merger. Gomez voted against, blasting the approval for requiring “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment.”
Experts said that while Trusty had no conflict yet, Carr and Gomez did. The fact that Gomez voted against Paramount did not mean she didn’t face a conflict under the rules, Shaub said.
Federal rules only require those who accept improper gifts to make a prompt reimbursement, but Shaub and the other experts said Carr and Gomez should have abstained from the vote.
“If you repay the face value of the ticket, the gift rules don’t require you to recuse — though common sense and any kind of conscience might lead you to recuse voluntarily for the good of the country,” Shaub said. “But if you refuse to repay the donor, I don’t see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem.”
With the Paramount-Skydance merger greenlit by the FCC, Ellison, the new company’s CEO, then set his sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.
Warner at first rebuffed Paramount’s overtures and on Dec. 5 — two days before the Kennedy Center gala — accepted a bid from Netflix to buy its studio and streaming assets. Ellison responded by making numerous calls to administration officials and had a long talk with Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.
On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal “could be a problem” and that he planned to get directly involved with the regulatory approval. Inside the Kennedy Center, Carr and his wife sat with Ellison in an exclusive skybox, Bloomberg reported. (Gomez said in her statement to ProPublica that she declined Paramount’s “invitation because of serious concerns about press independence connected to conditions Paramount agreed to as part of its merger transaction before the FCC.”)
If one or more commissioners choose to abstain from a merger vote because of ethical concerns, what would happen next is unclear. Under federal conflict of interest rules, an agency designee could theoretically permit commissioners to vote after considering several factors, including “the difficulty of reassigning the matter,” the nature of the relationship between the commissioners and Paramount, and the “effect that resolution of the matter would have upon the financial interests” of the firm.
Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely, as he did with the recent acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group. In that case, Carr delegated authority to FCC staff to approve the takeover.
But any decision on the Paramount deal — whether by the full commission or by staff at the direction of the chair — is likely to be challenged.
Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.
“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.
From the Founding through most of American history, courts allowed the legislature to control pornographic material. Judicial reactions to internet pornography broke this tradition to our great detriment.
His resumé aside, Candeub’s latest contribution to wider discussion on free speech, pornography, and obscenity law is replete with culture war talking points of very little substance. He frames his arguments as a patriotic call to action referencing the founding fathers of the United States on the occasion of our country’s semiquincentennial year.
He says they would have “supported” stronger obscenity regulations and a resumption of obscenity prosecutions, echoing recent calls by figures in the religious right and anti-porn movements to do so. It’s easy to claim what people 250 years ago would have said or believed since they’re not around to defend themselves.
But a casual look shows that several of the founding fathers were not particularly pure or morally superior when it came to sex and relationships. Even if you look past their somewhat infamous extramarital affairs, Ben Franklin was famous for both writing and sharing materials that might not even pass the test for obscenity today. Thomas Jefferson expressed deep outrage at the concept of censoring literature based on religious morality tests. Writing to bookseller Nicolas Dufief in 1814 after a magistrate threatened prosecution over a controversial text, Jefferson demanded, “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy?”
These are not the actions of men who would quickly embrace anti-obscenity laws.
I wrote for Techdirt not too long ago about the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, calling pornography a “national security threat” and urging the Department of Justice to resume prosecuting alleged obscenity as a way to fight pornography’s accessibility.
“Americans born after the mid-1990s have lived their entire lives in a world awash with hardcore pornography. Never has so much pornography been so available to so many at so little cost. Our laws leave much pornography effectively unregulated. Our technology, especially smartphones, brings portable, private porn shops to everyone’s phone.”
Aside from the clear misinformation about an “unregulated” pornography industry, Candeub proposes a supposed moral restoration of obscenity laws such that anything viewed through the lens of non-traditional sexual expression could be fair game for legislatures to heavily restrict or outright ban.
Much of his column summarizes a report he produced on the topic for the Heritage Foundation, which was published on July 6. The report is aptly titled, “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age.” It is replete with the same talking points from the most extremist elements of the anti-pornography movement who desire to ban all pornography.
He praises the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, which found that Texas could require age verification for online adult content, despite it going against previous Supreme Court First Amendment precedent.
The report also calls for the return of Comstock laws and the patchwork of anti-vice statutes that were historically used to prosecute individuals for “obscene” devices, the transmission of “prurient” content, and other prohibitions that lasted into the 20th century.
Most alarming, he views the high court’s 6-3 decision in the Paxton case as an optimistic but quite unclear step to modern Comstock prosecutions in state-level courts:
“Paxton may signal the reinvigoration of a dual-track approach to the regulation of obscenity: States can require oversight for minors, and mostly anything goes for adults. At the least, it is unclear what effect, if any, Paxton will have on obscenity for adults.”
He adds:
“The most optimistic result under current law would be a reinvigorated Miller with the national government again able to regulate the transmission of obscenity. The case’s flexible terms could allow for obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission. Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity.”
The bolded text is Candeub’s silver bullet. By his interpretation of the current Comstock law, the incumbent FCC’s general counsel is essentially calling for criminal prosecution for transmitting “obscene” web content across state lines because, well, the internet exists and it transcends borders.
This is exceptionally problematic for two reasons. First, Candeub works for the FCC and is backing a legal strategy that’s been used, historically, to aggressively prosecute women, LGBTQ+ individuals, entire communities of color, consensual sex workers, and pornographic and non-pornographic publishers for their speech.
This is the FCC presenting itself as the morality speech police.
Second, Candeub’s advocacy in this report and column conforms to Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s call for the prosecution of “pornographers” who spread “the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography.”
Candeub’s arguments are about far more than pornography. He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity. All of this is done in the guise of “restoring public morality” and “protecting children” from a supposed cultural decay.
Coming from the lead attorney for Trump’s FCC, one of the architects of Project 2025, and a likely to be senior DOJ official, this signals a terrifying push forward towards a public policy agenda to enable greater and greater censorship by dubbing things like LGBTQ+ content and legal adult pornography as something that can be banned.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
Back in February, Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr launched a fake “investigation” of ABC because the network’s comedians and daytime talk show hosts hadn’t adequately kissed Republican ass.
“Since then, the ABC talk show hasn’t featured a single political candidate running in a competitive midterm race, according to a Semafor analysis.”
Earlier in the year, Republicans were upset that The View hosted Texas Democratic hopeful James Talarico. That triggered an entire fake “investigation” and a threatened revocation of ABC’s broadcast licenses by Carr, who falsely claimed that the daytime talk show had violated the FCC’s dated and irrelevant “equal time” rule requiring that TV stations give equal time to political candidates from both parties.
The threat of annoying costly legal headaches were still apparently enough to scare ABC (and likely other outlets) away from hosting politicians who would be critical of Trump.
It’s a shame that ABC, which had previously started to show some a signs of life in its battle with the thin-skinned U.S. president, suddenly doesn’t really want to talk about why The View rejected requests to host NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or the democratic socialist candidates he supported for Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez:
“A spokesperson declined to provide Semafor with a comment about how the show was reacting to the inquiry but has previously said the show is a “bona fide news program” and therefore isn’t subject to the equal time rule.”
Carr, you’ll recall, also threatened San Francisco area AM radio station KCBSlate last year simply for reporting on local ICE activity, resulting in the station demoting one anchor and softening its political coverage overall. Carr also tried (and failed) to censor and fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel after the late night host made a joke about deceased right wing propagandist and racist Charlie Kirk.
That said, avoiding politics entirely for fear of losing money is fairly common across corporate media (including outlets like Semafor), resulting in no shortage of pseudo-journalism that pulls its punches, particularly when it comes to being honest about the continued Republican descent into bigotry and fascism.
Earlier this year I noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules that would have made it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after decades of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so you could easily switch to competitors.
Verizon, as I’ve long established, hates competition, and early last year immediately got to work lobbying the Trump administration to destroy the rules (falsely) claiming, without evidence, that the modest phone unlocking requirements were a boon to criminals and scammers. Since the rollback they’ve slowly been making unlocking more annoying, hoping a slowly boiled frog approach would keep it on the down low.
Enter one of Trump Corp’s other biggest constituents: Elon Musk and Space X.
I’ve already explained how the SpaceX IPO includes all sorts of fantastical claims related to Starlink (the only profitable company in the prospectus). Musk Corp insists Starlink will grow extremely quickly from 10 million current subscribers to 300 million. As I explain here that’s simply not happening, for a long list of reasons authoritarian pump and dumpers don’t actually care about.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle: to grow, Musk’s Starlink is hoping to increasingly tether Starlink to existing cellular providers. Starlink has increasingly partnered with companies like T-Mobile to extend connectivity for customers when they’re outside of the range of traditional towers.
So in a filing last month sent to the FCC, SpaceX joined a bunch of other smaller providers in pushing the FCC to adopt a new 180 day phone unlocking rule:
“…we write to urge the Commission to adopt a clear, uniform requirement that mobile devices be automatically unlocked within 180 days after activation. Automatic mobile device unlocking is essential to protecting consumer choice, promoting competition, and lowering costs in the mobile marketplace. Allowing a “lock period” of 180 days gives providers enough time to protect against the significant fraud concerns identified by the FCC and to ensure mobile devices are not exploited for criminal acts.”
So for one thing, the 180 day locked phone rule would be much worse (and far friendlier to giants like Verizon) than the 60 day lock window the Biden FCC proposed (but never actually implemented because our regulatory structures are too corrupted to function). You’d also have to doubt whether Brendan Carr, who largely supports big telecom positions across the board, would ever enforce them.
Another point of note is that the FCC’s claims that they had to destroy unlocking rules to “fight crime” are bullshit. They’ve provided zero hard evidence to support that idea. The destruction of unlocking rules was just blatant regulatory capture in service to Verizon lobbyists, using “crime” as flimsy justification.
Still, it’s interesting to see SpaceX suddenly on the other side of the table to Verizon in support of something that could, for once, actually help people.
Musk Corp appears to also have convinced three Republican Senators (Cynthia Lummis, John N. Kennedy, and Eric S. Schmitt) to send a letter to the FCC also supporting a new 180 day unlocking plan. You’ve also got people traditionally lined up against consumer rights — like former FCC Ajit Pai staffer Evan Swarztrauber — suddenly writing op-eds in favor of phone unlocking.
Swarztrauber crafts a bizarre alternate reality in his op-ed where Brendan Carr didn’t destroy popular unlocking rules, U.S. wireless is hyper cheap and competitive (despite his former boss Pai rubber stamping the Sprint-T-Mobile merger), and Republicans aren’t doing everything in their power to undermine internet access affordability. But he does make the correct point that arbitrary phone locks are anti-competitive:
“But mobile locking weakens all the pressure to reduce prices and improve service—and that’s by design. Reasonable waiting periods for phone unlocking to guard against fraud are fine—no one opposes that. But unlocking should otherwise be automatic once devices are paid off, and customers shouldn’t be forced to pay fees or jump through hoops to take their phones—their own property—to a competitor that could be saving them up to $1,000 annually.”
I think SpaceX simply wants to ensure its path into the cellular market expansion through partnership and acquisition, and knows unlocked phones lead to more competition. I think the sudden flood of Republican interest in phone unlocking comes primarily as a byproduct of SpaceX lobbying. I would not be surprised if SpaceX would consider a T-Mobile acquisition to grow very quickly and keep the valuation hype rolling down the road.
That said, I’d want to see the final, actual unlocking proposal before getting too excited. Republicans have historically opposed nearly every telecom consumer benefit policy that matters, their proposals uniformly include loopholes to ensure the biggest companies are well coddled, and it’s entirely possible that the finished proposal could have more than its share of bad ideas. Stay tuned.
DOGE was always designed to provide flimsy pseudo-efficiency cover for wholesale corruption. It was designed to pretend that the government was “cutting waste and fraud” while a bunch of velour tracksuit wearing con men stripped the country for parts and sold what was left off the back loading dock.
As we’ve since explored, DOGE also burned through billions of dollars, exposed the sensitive data of untold Americans, killed untold millions of people worldwide, and generally distracted dim and misinformed Americans from the fact their government is too corrupt to function in the public interest and is no longer capable of consistently standing up to corporate power.
Enter Brendan Carr, who appears to be under fire for the FCC’s efforts to hide his agency’s correspondence with DOGE bros. Last year, journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward sued the FCC, alleging that the agency violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records.
In a new filing (via Ars Technica) in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Burleigh and Frequency Forward say Carr also hid his use of Signal as a communications tool, which they apparently believe he used to communicate with DOGE:
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”
While Carr’s obnoxious censorship efforts get all the policy and media attention, he’s also been at work destroying the FCC’s consumer protection authority, eliminating media consolidation limits, and dismantling what little corporate oversight we had left at the agency. This was “cleverly” dubbed Carr’s “delete, delete, delete” agenda. Telecom monopolies and robocallers love the plan.
It’s not clear what a bunch of 20-something Elon Musk cult members could have contributed to Carr’s mindless demolition of public interest governance, but it sure would be nice to take a transparent look, given the vast financial conflicts of interest between Musk’s fake government agency and the multiple Musk-owned companies looking (and getting) giant financial favors from the FCC.
“The evidence strongly suggests that Musk bought his way into the White House and to obtain his position as the de-facto head of DOGE, and that he had used his government authority and access to information to earn huge profits for himself and his companies,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Plaintiffs’ FoIA request seeks documents that shed light on the relationship between the FCC, Musk as regulator and Musk and his companies as regulated entities.”
Meanwhile, I still think it’s embarrassing that the press, and some Dem politicians, initially treated DOGE as if it was a good faith effort they could work with. As opposed to what it clearly was all along: corruption and grift under the flimsy veneer of improved government efficiency.
