Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Truthfully, Trump’s whole authoritarian project would not be possible without underlings like Carr to help advance it for him. So what are the prospects for accountability for this sort of public misconduct later? We’re talking about this with New Republic staff writer Matt Ford, who has a great new piece laying out what a real reckoning for Trump and his accomplices should look like after this is all over. Matt, great to have you on.
Sargent: Okay, so this started when FCC Chair Brendan Carr put out a tweet recently threatening broadcasters. He said they must course-correct or potentially not get their broadcast licenses renewed. He insisted that the law dictates that they must operate in the public interest or lose their licenses.
Ford: Sure. I mean, what he’s arguing here is that he will use the FCC’s power to regulate the airwaves to block license renewals for broadcast stations. There’s really no precedent for that in American history—certainly not for the censorious nature of what he’s calling for. But like you say, I mean, it’s a common misconception that ABC, NBC, Fox actually own these stations themselves. What they are instead are affiliates. And the stations are often owned by other companies—companies like Sinclair, companies like Nexstar. They are the ones who own them, and each of these licenses is held by an individual station. A station in New York City has a different one than a station in, you know, Albany or Washington, D.C., or Boston. So it would be a process to go and revoke these licenses one by one—that’s the bare mechanics.
Sargent: Well, I want to get into that in a bit—about the public interest. But first, let’s listen to Trump talk about Brendan Carr for a little bit.
Sargent: Matt, that’s quite something. Everybody in this whole country supports government bullying of networks to turn them into propaganda outlets on Trump’s behalf, according to Trump. But seriously—note how Trump says Carr is doing a great job. Thing is, as far as I can tell, none of his threats have resulted in any real changes in coverage or any licenses lost, have they?
The affiliates like Sinclair declined to broadcast it, and they eventually relented amid public pressure and a lot of the backlash. So Carr can’t really do what he’s doing without the cooperation of the corporations that control these stations on an individual level.
Donald Trump (voiceover): We have to have a press that’s respected. When you can win an election where they say that I got 94 percent bad press—think of it, the other side got 94 percent good press—when they can get 94 percent and you win in a landslide, that means the press is not respected. People have no confidence. So you’re doing a fantastic job.
Ford: I mean, it’s legally and constitutionally gibberish. The media is not supposed to support the president. Whether it opposes the president is up to the media, but this idea that that’s the spectrum on which the media is judged is simply not true. The media is there to present information—especially the news media. And the First Amendment protects that to a very significant degree, especially when the government tries to compel broadcast networks and broadcast affiliates to not present certain viewpoints.
Sargent: It’s unclear exactly what he’s arguing for. Is it basically that Brendan Carr needs to go out and yank the licenses of any affiliates of networks that don’t engage in propaganda about his war? Is that what he’s saying?
Sargent: Well, I think there’s a paradox at work here as well, which is that Brendan Carr can’t really accomplish anything real with his threats. Yet at the same time, the mere threats themselves constitute serious abuses of power. I mean, is Brendan Carr allowed by law to openly threaten to revoke the licenses—or to actually revoke the licenses—of news organizations to punish them for not being sufficiently praiseworthy of Trump? Is that allowed?
The First Amendment gives broadcasters broad latitude to air programs that are political in nature, that are social in nature, that express certain viewpoints and certain opinions. The idea that the president can just order them—or that the FCC even can just order them—not to do that would run into severe legal trouble if it were ever tested in a court of law. And I think that goes back to what we were saying earlier. There’s a reason that Carr isn’t actually trying to put pen to paper on any of this—I think it’s because he knows he would lose in court.
I mean, isn’t that the essence of it? What does “serve the public interest” actually mean in legal terms here?
They treat Trump as some sort of omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent avatar of the public will because they won one election by a few percentage points. And as a result, they believe that every other institution in America must bow to him. They do not believe in pluralism, they do not believe in multipolar democracy, they don’t believe in the autonomy of civic institutions. And I think this really reflects that—which is ironic because, you know, the term comes from a desire to have a lot of different viewpoints out there.
Ford: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I think the core theme of all American political philosophy is that power has to be divided—it can’t be concentrated in one man or one institution. That’s why we have three branches of government. That’s why we have 50 states and a federal government, neither of whom enjoy absolute power over the other. It’s why we have 100 senators and 435 lawmakers. We Americans inherently [distrust] any concentration of power, whether public or private, and our system of government is designed to forestall that.
Ford: Well, I want to start off with a caveat that it would depend heavily on the facts of a specific case. I don’t want to say with absolute certainty that courts would do one thing or another when they approach this, but I’ll give a broad answer that I think will help. The Roberts Court has done a lot of things that have frustrated and aggravated liberals—I could go on for the rest of this podcast about all the things they’ve done. And I have done that in past podcasts.
I think that’s important, because if we have to assume that’s going to be the baseline in future legal challenges, the Roberts Court will look at something and say, hey, this would be violating the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint restrictions by the government. There are areas where the government can regulate speech—if something is obscene, if it’s imminently lawless or violent. But this wouldn’t fall into those exceptions. And so as long as they maintain that framework, I would be highly optimistic if I were a broadcaster staring down the barrel of a legal threat from Trump’s FCC.
It seems like what Carr is doing is a really good example of that, but we’re kind of in this situation where he can abuse his powers this way and just skirt running afoul of any laws himself, making accountability harder. Is there any hope for accountability for someone like Brendan Carr?
But I think one area of the law where intervention might be justified is when it comes to antitrust regulation. One of the key mechanisms that the Trump administration has used to support and buoy favorable media outlets—places like Paramount, run by the Ellisons, who also now own CBS News, and who are trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery; places like Sinclair—what they’ve tried to do is use their ability to approve or disapprove mergers to steer them in a friendly direction. And that knife cuts both ways.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about the big picture that you laid out in your piece. I mean, what we’re seeing here from Trump and Brendan Carr is like an Orbanization of the news media, sort of a similar playbook that other dictators and authoritarians have used, in which they leverage state power in whatever way they can to try to control whatever institution is in their sights at any moment. You did a sort of 30,000-foot view of how all this stuff is moving the country into fascism and oligarchy, and talked about the ways Trump can be held accountable down the line. But it looks to me like the accomplices are not going to be held accountable, and that’s a pretty serious problem. Is it not?
But as I pointed out, there are other ways to hold people accountable. Democrats are set to take over the House and potentially the Senate after this year’s midterms. Obviously a lot can happen between now and then, but if you’re a Democrat, you’re probably pretty happy about the trajectory of the polling.
Sargent: Just to circle back to kind of where we started—Donald Trump is out there praising Brendan Carr for doing this fabulous job of keeping the media in line, and yet at the same time, Brendan Carr is actually not doing anything except making a bunch of public threats that he never acts on, which may or may not be having some sort of chilling effect, but certainly aren’t having anything close to the effect that Trump would actually like. So here’s the question, Matt—
Sargent: You’d think. But I think that actually gets at the point I want to close on, which is Carr isn’t actually having the impact Trump claims. And so it sort of seems like this is really about putting on a show for this weird kind of MAGA audience out there that wants to think Trump is knocking the heads of institutions together and owning the libs in every way and crushing every enemy in his path—especially the news media wants to believe that—but it isn’t actually happening. So is this just a show for those people? Or is the fact that Brendan Carr is making these threats such an abuse of power in and of itself that this actually is kind of part of this drift into authoritarianism that we’re talking about?
It’s deeply concerning to see any public officials—people paid by our tax dollars to act in our best interest—carrying out these whims and trying to enforce some sort of ideological vision upon the rest of the country through these broadcast networks. I think it is important to note that they don’t seem to be succeeding, but the fact that they’re trying, and convincing themselves of that, is in and of itself very disturbing and very scandalous.
Ford: Thanks so much for having me.
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