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FCC chair Brendan Carr has already inspired widespread fear (and loathing) among media elites and free press advocates. And he’s only been in the job for two months.
By Steven Zeitchik
Senior Editor, Awards
Brendan Carr loves a good luggage metaphor.
When he was a law student at Catholic University in the early 2000s, Carr heard a talk from Michael Powell, then the chair of the FCC under George W. Bush. “When opportunity knocks, most people don’t have their bags packed,” Powell told the audience. Carr was so energized by the line that he made it his own rise-up mantra and now recites it when speaking to law students himself.
The 46-year-old has been unloading a lot of baggage lately. Ever since Donald Trump bumped Carr up to chair of the FCC in November (after naming him a commissioner during his first term), Carr has attacked the country’s media, entertainment and even tech giants with a cool fury, threatening their business and, critics say, attempting to bully them into more favorable coverage of the president.
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“Americans no longer trust the national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly,” he wrote in a December letter to Bob Iger, one of several recent accusatory missives to media executives. “ABC’s own conduct has certainly contributed to this erosion in public trust.” He noted ominously that he’ll now be “monitoring the outcome” of unrelated financial negotiations with the network’s station affiliates.
Historically concerned with the sundry matters of broadcast licenses and station fines, the FCC hardly would seem like the centerpiece of a major media-suppression effort. Nor would a conservative former lawyer who has spent his entire adult life in D.C. — and who was so incensed by the Obama administration’s comparatively minor intervention on net neutrality that he railed against “government control over [Americans’] lives” — seem like the man to commandeer it.
Yet Carr has done just that, reading signals from a media-bashing Donald Trump and mercilessly carrying out his will in ways even the president might not have called for.
“Off the leash sounds about right,” says Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication and longtime chronicler of the FCC.
Carr has demanded top executives explain themselves in private meetings, warned media companies against prioritizing the hiring or promotion of diverse candidates, and criticized their editorial choices; he has held out the threat of combative public hearings and, yes, intimidated executives with the specter of potentially costly reviews of their dealings.
From state-funded outfits like NPR and PBS to private behemoths like Disney, Comcast and even Google, almost no player in modern broadcast media has been spared, as Carr has turned a wonky office into a cudgel against media companies and, many experts say, the free press itself.
If Carr has his way, the decades-long rise of Fox News and other right-wing media will now be accompanied by the diminishment of plenty of moderate, centrist and liberal ones.
Or as Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal characterized Carr’s actions in an inquiry he announced March 13 — “unprecedented, intrusive investigations against media broadcasters under arbitrary and capricious pretenses.”
***
For much of its 90 years, the FCC has moved tentatively. Created to oversee the nation’s airwaves at a simpler time when there were just radio stations and a few TV networks — and, as an independent agency that doesn’t report to the White House but to Congress, free of political urgencies — the FCC largely has been reluctant to set ambitious policy or wade into controversy. Even its most famous modern moment in the spotlight — when it levied $550,000 in fines on CBS and its affiliates for 2004’s Super Bowl Nipplegate — had a kind of workaday quality to it. (The fines were overturned on appeal.)
The commission features five members serving five-year terms each, with some possibility for extensions. The apparatus is almost calibrated for caution: Each party is guaranteed at least two commissioners at all times. The president names new commissioners, and the chair and the full commission must vote on any policy decisions. The GOP will have a majority after Trump’s nominee for the fifth seat, Republican Olivia Trusty, is almost inevitably confirmed by the Senate.
In the months since he’s been handed that job, however, Carr has left all cautious precedent behind. He has opened a probe into Comcast over its DEI policies (“invidious forms of DEI discrimination”) and sent a letter to Verizon telling it to move faster to dismantle its own. He also has reinstated formal complaints by various parties that were dismissed by his predecessor, Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel: one against CBS for allegedly doctoring its Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview per a Trump lawsuit; one against ABC for its moderation of a presidential debate; another against NBC for booking Harris on SNL. (Never mind that the network gave Trump a spot on a much higher-rated NFL game the next day.) He has not, however, revived a dismissed complaint against Fox News over its alleged post-2020 election disinformation.
Carr has investigated public broadcasters NPR and PBS for airing commercials, a not-so-veiled effort to, as the formal legal term has it, bust the liberal organizations’ balls.
But it’s not just Joe Pesci machismo on his mind. All of these individual bullying moments could, in critics’ view, add up to something much more dire and concrete: remaking the media landscape as a decidedly conservative stronghold with little tolerance for dissent. It’s no coincidence Comcast, a frequent Carr target, owns MSNBC, MAGA’s biggest critic.
“I think Brendan Carr’s objective is not unlike Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary,” says Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, a long-standing D.C. progressive group focused on media-regulation reform. “There’s a much broader play to quash the independence of media systems.” Such efforts are working, she says, citing ABC News’ recent payment of $15 million to settle a libel lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and reports she’s gotten of local news stations backing off Trump stories after getting letters from Carr.
Carr provided the world with a largely undisguised road map for his intentions in the 922-page manifesto of Project 2025, for which he wrote the section on the FCC. He listed seven objectives. The first was to “promote freedom of speech” — which critics note is a recurring euphemism for platforming hard-right views and a major divergence from the FCC’s actual mandate, “to make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, nationwide, and worldwide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges” (according to the Telecommunications Act of 1996).
In his treatise, Carr presented a strikingly expansionist view of the FCC, suggesting it be deployed on everything from slowing Chinese AI development to funding Elon Musk’s Starlink. Carr talks of a desire to “reempower the local broadcasters to feel like they have the freedom to serve their local communities” but pointedly leaves out the national media, for which, his missives suggest, he harbors little love.
Lean and with a closely cropped white beard, Carr has gone after even unexpected parties. Tech companies don’t fall under the purview of the FCC — the agency regulates only traditional communications. That renders him powerless to do something about a longtime pet peeve — social platforms’ alleged quashing of right-wing voices.
So the ex-lawyer has targeted Alphabet/Google’s YouTube TV for “discriminating against faith-based programming,” recently opening an inquiry into the tech megalith for what he says are efforts to restrict the upstart Hallmark competitor Great American Network from gaining visibility on its service.
“I’m writing to determine whether YouTube TV has a policy or practice that favors discrimination against faith-based channels,” Carr wrote to Google and Alphabet’s chief execs earlier in March, citing the unrelated Section 230 that gives tech platforms legal protection against liability, also a pet peeve.
Which channels a private company chooses to carry is not part of the regulatory agency’s mandate. And Great American Network has a popular channel on sister platform YouTube. Yet Carr concluded his letter by ordering YouTube executives to contact his office so that they can come in for “a briefing.”
Two days after Carr’s X post March 7 that he “has received complaints that Google’s @YouTubeTV is discriminating against faith-based programming,” Donald Trump Jr. reposted the message and broken-telephoned it into, “Is anyone surprised that Google is discriminating against Christian faith based programming?” Some 14,000 users liked the post.
A Carr representative did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this story. At a state-of-media event hosted by online outlet Semafor in Washington three weeks ago, Carr told interviewer Ben Smith that what he was doing was no different than what a Democrat-led FCC was doing during the Biden years and aimed to apply the law without regard for party.
But ex-FCC chairs from both parties have raised the alarm over his rampage. George H.W. Bush-era chair, Republican Alfred Sikes, told journalist Oliver Darcy in February that the First Amendment “should be foundational not just in the Constitution but in the way the FCC acts,” joining chairs from the Clinton and Obama eras in criticizing Carr.
Carr can react with almost Muskian joy at criticism, even from a fellow Republican. “I feel bad for the three of them,” Carr said in a statement to Darcy about Sikes and the two Democrats. “I [have to] imagine it’s hard when the curtain is closing on your career.”
When Sheryl Crow said she was selling her Tesla and donating the profits to NPR as an anti-DOGE protest, Carr baited her on X: “I know celebrities are hesitant to weigh in on hot button issues, so I appreciate Sheryl Crow making an argument here — not through words alone, but through her actions — that Congress should not force taxpayers to subsidize NPR.”
He also casually tosses out conspiracy-adjacent ideas that the FCC during the Biden years favored George Soros, and routinely goes on Fox News to tout Trump’s greatness and a new golden age. Post-inauguration, Carr popped onto the network to say that Trump’s return to Washington made “patriotic Americans feel like the sense of decline, the sense of malaise that’s taken over the country over the last four years is ending.”
***
Carr was born to lawyer in Washington. His late father, Tom, subsidized his own studies at Georgetown in the 1960s by working in the mailroom at the Dirksen Senate building, then got a law degree at the University of Virginia. Tom Carr would go on to work in a host of D.C. cases and at one point even represented Richard Nixon.
The only son of Tom and his then-wife, Barbara, Brendan Carr spent his whole childhood in the D.C. area, eventually following in his father’s path to Georgetown. Conservative politics were never far from his own résumé. When he was 29, he got a job clerking for appellate judge Dennis Shedd, a former chief counsel for conservative South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond.
Communications also was wired into Carr’s career from an early point. He interned at the FCC while in law school, and when he graduated in 2005, he went to work for Wiley Rein, the law firm co-founded by Dick Wiley, the chair of the FCC under Nixon and Ford who pushed hard for deregulation. In his seven years at the firm, Carr litigated appeals of FCC orders and advised clients on how to gain FCC approval.
By the time Carr left the firm to serve as a legal adviser to the FCC in 2012 at the tender age of 33 (he’d soon work for the idiosyncratic Republican commissioner and eventual chair Ajit Pai), anything less than an ascent to chair would have been a surprise script-turn.
His activist streak both online and in the halls of the agency’s L Street headquarters has alarmed those who’ve devoted their lives to studying the FCC.
“This is jaw-droppingly different from how the agency has worked. I’ve never seen this — and I’ve literally written a book about the FCC,” says Kim Zarkin, chair of the communications department at Westminster University in Utah (and author of The Federal Communications Commission: Front Line in the Culture and Regulation Wars).
Zarkin says some past commissioners have successfully advanced an ideological agenda. Reagan’s commissioner in the 1980s, Mark Fowler, pushed for deregulation and a repeal of the Fairness Doctrine requiring balanced coverage, leading to the media polarization of today.
And there have been cases of so-called “regulation by raised eyebrow” or “jawboning,” in which a critical speech from an FCC chair sends broadcasters scurrying. In the early ’70s, Nixon’s chair Dean Burch gave a harshly worded speech about so-called “topless radio”— a new concept that involved women calling in to stations with intimate details of their sex lives — that caused stations to drop the format, which effectively killed it.
But efforts to bring news outlets to heel have never been attempted by an FCC chair before. “Brendan Carr is breaking the mold — and not in a good way,” Zarkin says.
Those who’ve sat in Carr’s seat also express disbelief at what’s happening.
“I’m about as worried as I can be about the future of the FCC,” Michael Copps, a commissioner at the agency during both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years and for a time also the acting chair, tells THR. “I would say Carr is the most ideological chairman we’ve ever had — and the most political.” There have been 35 previous chairs of the FCC.
***
Whether Carr really is a hardcore ideologue or simply an opportunist using the ascendant ideology to gain attention is debated in regulatory circles. Those arguing for the latter note that prior to his Project 2025 authorship, Carr had rarely sounded many prosecutorial hard-right notes. If adoration from Trump and Musk was the goal, it has been achieved. Carr has been summoned to Mar-a-Lago at least four times.
Despite a childhood in the wealthy suburb of McLean, Virginia, and years at a tony law firm, Carr has taken pains to cultivate an image as an everyman. He has been known to wear cowboy boots to FCC meetings and sometimes puts on a hard hat and gets into a lift to rise to the top of a broadcast tower for photo ops, as he did in Alabama in February.
“It is always a fun experience to get up in the air and hang with a tower crew,” Carr said at the time.
Such populist gestures feel odd to those who’ve interacted with Carr in legal settings. A person who knew him early in his career says the lawyer operated with a shrewd confidence in boardrooms all over the capital. “He is often the sharpest legal mind in the room, and he doesn’t mind at all if you know he’s the sharpest legal mind in the room,” says the person, who asked for anonymity so as not to jeopardize a potential relationship with him.
Free Press’ González believes Carr “is more dangerous” than Trump or Musk. “Those guys are outsiders. Brendan Carr has been inside the building and knows the administrative procedure better than anyone.”
Carr’s associations with the new power elite also worry experts. “I see Carr as an acolyte of Musk, and I find that relationship troubling,” says Fritz Messere. Messere was assistant to Republican FCC commissioner Mimi Dawson during the Reagan years, and he tells THR that he is especially concerned given Carr’s criticism of the agency’s decision several years ago to deny Musk’s bid for $900 million in rural broadband subsidies to Starlink, along with decisions on other potential benefits to Musk still to come.
Beltway chatter speculating on Carr’s post-FCC future has sometimes put him in the private sector working for Musk. When Carr made a pilgrimage to SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, to pose with Musk, he hailed the businessman’s achievements as potentially “driving efficiency in government, and unleashing a new cycle of American innovation.” Musk has publicly approved of Carr’s dissent with the FCC’s Starlink decision.
The solicitation of other global figures’ interest has been a regular feature of Carr’s public persona. He has posted shots of himself with such figures as far-right U.K. politician Nigel Farage. This has a twofold effect: It solidifies Carr’s conservative bona fides and positions him as a global player.
And despite his glee in sniping at the press, Carr seems willing and occasionally even enthusiastic to engage with mainstream reporters, chatting with a host of them at a reception after the Semafor conference, perhaps realizing that while he doesn’t think the national media can be trusted to report fully, accurately and fairly, they can be counted on to bolster a bureaucrat’s career.
***
For all his MAGA cred, Carr has not always been aligned with Trump, a point he seems keen to downplay. As commissioner, he talked a lot about the risks posed by TikTok — “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” he said in 2022. But he was noticeably quiet on the matter when Trump granted ByteDance a reprieve shortly after inauguration. (Carr long has taken a hard stance against China, for years maintaining a photo on X of a Hong Kong protester of Chinese rule.)
He has also been a vocal critic of Section 230, a position that puts him at odds with the tech broligarchs who have cozied up to Trump.
Meanwhile, Carr’s wife, Machalagh Carr, a former chief of staff to former House Speaker and frequent Trump rival Kevin McCarthy, a year ago launched a small-government-minded consulting firm with Bill Barr, Trump’s former attorney general turned rival who famously said that as a result of Jan. 6, Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” As with so many Republicans who once shook their heads about Trump, these affiliations aren’t discussed. Machalagh Carr as of February works for Palantir Technologies, the secretive data-mining operation that is making a big push into the U.S. government and causing activists to raise alarm bells.
The effort to push back on Carr’s Trumpian agenda is beginning to take root, though with what degree of success remains unclear. Sen. Blumenthal filed his inquiry with two internal FCC departments, asking them essentially to investigate their own agency, but how much freedom or interest they have in going against Carr remains to be seen.
FCC commissioner Anna Gomez has become the agency’s Democratic voice of resistance, Chris Murphy to Carr’s Trump, even as her ultimate impact is similarly unclear. “Stoking partisan culture wars is not the FCC’s job,” she volleyed when the Comcast inquiry began. She also said that “we cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press” when all those complaints were reinstated.
And corporate media hasn’t always backed down. On March 10, CBS pushed back against a complaint accompanying a $20 million Trump lawsuit over 60 Minutes‘ editing of its Harris interview. In a filing with the FCC, it said the complaint “envisions a less free world in which the federal government becomes a roving censor.” Talk about a potential settlement, which has been discussed internally, has now quieted as CBS seems willing to fight it out, even as the FCC reviews parent company Paramount’s sale to Skydance and Carr is likely to seek concessions.
Carr may also be constrained by mandate. One of his biggest ideological pet peeves, the repeal of Section 230, can only be changed by an act of Congress. And while he can certainly hassle media companies, the FCC has fairly limited power over major firms not seeking approval for a merger, a group that currently includes everyone but Paramount. In many cases, the most he could do is tie them up in lengthy hearings. Should any of them sue, they’re likely to win.
Yet experts warn Carr doesn’t need to be practically or legally effective to blunt the media.
“The fear of getting dragged into something expensive is what does the trick,” says Pickard, the Annenberg expert, citing the ABC settlement. “Just knowing they could attract attention is what keeps them supine and not asking tough questions. It keeps them meek.
“I think,” he added, “we should be very scared.”
Alex Weprin contributed to this report.
This story appeared in the March 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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